Sexing skulls using discriminant function analysis of visually assessed traits

The accuracy of sex determinations based on visual assessments of the mental eminence, orbital margin, glabellar area, nuchal area, and mastoid process was tested on a series of 304 skulls of known age and sex from people of European American, African American, and English ancestry as well as on an ancient Native American sample of 156 individuals whose sex could be reliably determined based on pelvic morphology. Ordinal scores of these sexually dimorphic traits were used to compute sex determination discriminant functions. Linear, kth-nearest-neighbor, logistic, and quadratic discriminant analysis models were evaluated based on their capacity to minimize both misclassifications and sex biases in…