CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Sex estimation of adult skeletons is an important step in forensic analysis. Although the femur has been metricallystudied for sex assessment around the world, very limited information is actually available on modernpopulations of Argentina. In this paper, the estimation of sex based on the metric evaluation of the superoinferiorfemoral neck diameter (SID) in a reference osteological collection from the contemporary ChacaritaCemetery of Buenos Aires City (Argentina), is evaluated. Protocols generated using SID in other three referenceskeletal samples are also tested on this collection. One hundred and sixty-four individuals of both sexes andbetween 24 and 96 years old are analyzed. Inter and intra observer errors suggest that the replicability of theprocedure is adequate. The sectioning point calculated from the direct measurements is 30.86 mm and resultsshow a high degree of dimorphism. The proportions of correct sex discrimination and the likelihoods of correctallocation obtained with the direct measurements, along with the results of a discriminant function, a binarylogistic regression and a Bayesian approach, are all higher than 0.85 (0.85?0.93 for females, 0.88?0.91 formales). When the formulae from other samples are used in the Chacarita Collection, the percentages of correctestimations range between 72.41% and 81.03% for females and between 80.46% and 88.50% for males, whilethe likelihoods are between 0.73 and 0.81 for females and between 0.79 and 0.82 for males. As the values for theestimations obtained using the statistical procedures generated in the present research are higher than thoseavailable for other collections, the method is more adequate to use in the analysis of contemporary skeletalremains from Buenos Aires and surrounding areas. The trends identified highlight the importance of populationspecificmetric methodologies in forensic contexts and deserve future testing in contemporary samples fromneighbouring regions.