Forensic Tools for Species Identification of Skeletal Remains: Metrics, Statistics, and OsteoID.

ABSTRACT: Although nonhuman remains constitute a significant portion of forensic anthropological casework, the potential use of bone metrics to assess the human origin and to classify species of skeletal remains has not been thoroughly investigated. This study aimed to assess the utility of quantitative methods in distinguishing human from nonhuman remains and present additional resources for species identification. Over 50,000 measurements were compiled from humans and 27 nonhuman (mostly North American) species. Decision trees developed from the long bone data can differentiate human from nonhuman remains with over 90% accuracy (>98% accuracy for the human sample), even if all long bones are pooled. Stepwise discriminant function results were slightly lower (>87.4% overall accuracy). The quantitat

SUBMITTER: Garvin HM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8773354 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature