Estimation of sex from the jaw: Discriminant Analysis

DESÁNTOLO, B.; BASAL, R.; GARCÍA MANCUSO, R.; PLISCHUK, M.; ERRECALDE, A.; INDA, A.

La Plata

Congreso; XII Congreso de Ciencias Morfológicas y 9º Jornadas de Educación; 2010

Sociedad de Ciencias Morfológicas La Plata

The aim of this work was to develop a specific discriminant function to estimate the sex from the jaw. The sample consisted of 110 mandibles from the osteological collection ?Prof. Dr. Rómulo Lambre? (School of Medical Sciences, University of La Plata, Argentina). We selected 77 non-pathological mandibles that were surveyed on nine metric variables by traditional morphometric techniques. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS 17.0. Six of the nine variables showed significant differences between the sexes (p ≤ 0.05). The most powerful discriminatory variables were the symphysis height, symphysis width and mandibular bicondilar length. The discriminant function obtained classified correctly 76.6% of the cases original grouped and 74.0% of cases through cross-validation. We believe that the underrepresentation of female individuals and the age range of the sample could have influenced the results, because the percentage of correctly classified cases in this sample is lower than those obtained from other reference collections