| Description |
In anthropology, determining sex of is one of the important factors in analyzing skeletal remains. Many good techniques exist using such elements as the pelvis and skull and many other bones can be used as well. In the past little, has been done into the research of using human teeth to determine sex because they are difficult to measure and the sexual differences are slight. Despite this fact however, using teeth for determining sex can be useful in certain situations such as when other bones are unavailable -due to poor preservation for example- and sexing sub-adults. In this study, molars were measured of 49 prehistoric Native American Utahns. These measurements were then compiled and analyzed to make up classification functions to determine sex. Next, two things were determined; (1) whether or not teeth could be used for sexual determination and (2) which of the variables would produce the best results. From the statistical analysis, accuracies from 68.2 to 91.7 percent were obtained, with a combination of M2 and M3 giving the highest percentage. This compared well with past studies that used teeth for sexual determination and also with studies using elements such as the skull and os pubis (and this study proved to be more flexible in the number of cases it can analyze). It was also found that having more measurements, using multiple teeth in each classification function, also helped improve the accuracy. However, with a more in depth study, with bigger sample sizes, some of these numbers may go down as they could be artificially high due to small sample sizes. Despite this fact, teeth offer a meaningful and useful technique for sexing human remains especially when you consider cases where other elements are poorly preserved, or are immature as with sub-adults. |
