Sexing contemporary Tanzanian skeletonized remains using skull morphology: A test of the walker sex assessment method

Abstract

Determination of sex in a burial or comingled assemblage is an essential element in forensic human skeletal identification. Establishing the sex of individual skeletal remains using skull landmarks is one of the traditional human osteological methods. This study sampled 86 skeletonized skulls of contemporary Tanzanians to test a popular sex assessment technique developed by Walker's cranial nonmetric approach. The sex estimate was scored from Walker's Log Regression equations involving nuchal crest, mastoid, glabella, mental eminence and supra orbit ridge characters. Basing on the formula, females display feature scores of 1–3, and males typically display individual feature scores of 3–5. At the same time, mastoid and glabella were the best features of sex determination after the evaluation. Also, the test displayed a high overlap between males' and females' characteristics of mental eminence, nuchal crest, and supraorbital ridge. Generally, the Walker sex estimation method using cranial features on current skeletonized Tanzania population failed to provide concrete sex assessment results, thus justifying the suggestion that; we need a modified population-specific approach.

Keywords

• Assessment of sex
• Forensic human skeletal identification
• Regression equations
• Nonmetric method
• Cranial features