Postcranial Racial Identification

‘Race’ is a term with many negative connotations, one can’t help but think of the conflicts and atrocities that have occurred throughout history as a result of racial classification. As a result race has been retired as a valid representation of human biological diversity. Far more common in lay persons day to day life, the term ethnicity has become prominent as a replacement ‘politically correct’ term for classifying an individual’s ancestry, migration status, nationality, citizenship, religion and language Burns (1999). Nevertheless forensic anthropologists still use ‘race’ as a key identifying factor when assessing human remains. Being able to place an individual or group into a distinct category allows anthropologists to give a reasonably
Citing that post cranial bone lengths could be used when skulls are damaged or not present. A review of this section in the 2013 3rd edition features the racial differences in the femur in place of long bone lengths. Namely the anterior curvature, proximal diaphysis shape, and intercondylar notch depth. Other methods appear to revolve around body shape (rather than length alone). Bermanns rule states that body bass increases as temperatures decreases, resulting in wider and shorter bodies. Allens rule sates that in warmer climates individuals tend to be taller and more slender resulting in longer thinner bones. Burns (2013) Holiday TW, Falsetti AB (1999) correctly identified 82% of males but only 57% of females with using seven post cranial measurements to distinguish between African Americans and European Americans. The lack of accuracy in females could be due to the lack of participants; however neither males nor females show a high enough accuracy rate to give a confirmed result. Rather post cranial methods appear to be supplementary measure in creating a racial
For example, in a homicide case where the victim is unidentified, an accurate estimation of that persons features, including racial profile, can be cross referenced with reports of missing persons or known criminals to attain a positive ID for the victim. In areas of limited diversity, where one ethnicity is prominent as the clear majority, identifying the remains of a victim that was in a minority racial group would narrow the search parameters drastically. Resulting in a quicker positive identification of the remains. In the case of John Wayne Gacy, 33 victims were recovered from under and around his house. It is believed that some relatives of victims were unwilling to come forward and ID victims due to the alleged homosexual nature of the crimes. After all the detective work that could be done to identify the remains was done, it fell to forensic anthropologists Charles P. Warren and Clayde C. Snow to give profiles of the remaining victims. This process involved organising the remains into each individual, identifying sex, age, height, pathologies and reconstructions, as well as race. As a result of this effort the victims were identified as being Caucasian males in his teens or early twenties. Without forensic anthropologists victims such as former marine David Talsma may have never been positively