Title Discoveries from the Forensic Anthropology Data Base: Modern American Skeletal Change & the Case of Amelia Earhart

Abstract

In the mid‐1980s the University of Tennessee (UT) Anthropology Department began accumulating data from forensic cases that came into our laboratory and others around the country providing the first insight into skeletal changes occurring in the past 150 years. Also in the 1980s the UT Forensic Anthropology Center founded a willed body program to study human decomposition. The donated body program formed the basis for an unprecedented collection of modern American skeletons for skeletal biology research. Thus began the Forensic Anthropology Data base (FDB), which now contains osteometric data from over 4000 individuals, most of them of known age, sex, and ancestry, as well as height, weight, place of birth, place of death, and other premortem biological characteristics of interest (e.g. handedness, pathologies, occupation).The FDB data base has resulted in a number of major developments and discoveries, three of which will be summarized in this presentation: Documentation of remarkable change in cranial and postcranial morphology in the past 150 years. The cranium has become higher, longer and narrower during this time interval. The skeleton has also become more gracile, and limb bone proportions have changed. Development of a software package, Fordisc 3.1, that uses the FDB and sophisticated statistical algorithms to estimate sex, ancestry and height from bone measurements. The Fordisc software program has changed the face of forensic anthropology casework since its inception in 1993. Probable identification of Amelia Earhart by comparing estimates of her bone lengths based on photographs to lengths of bones found on Nikumaroro Island in 1940. Support or Funding InformationNational Institute of Justice 85‐IJ‐CX‐0021This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.