ANCESTRY
Many of the cues we use to assess someone’s ancestry in life are not well demon strated in the skeleton. Moreover, ancestry or “race” is a difficult concept, both biologically and socially: Human physical variation is often a subtle thing and people are sensitive to the labels other people place on them. While it is true that no pure ethnic groups exist (or have ever existed), we identify people based partly on what we perceive their “race” to be. This combination of blurred ancestral categories and popular perception, not to mention people’s racial self-identity, makes ancestry one of the most difficult estimations in a forensic anthropologist’s examination. Nonetheless, forensic anthropologists routinely are called upon to assess skeletal remains for clues as to that person’s ancestral affiliation to help lead police toward identification. The terms forensic anthropologists use to designate ancestry are typically those of the United States Census, namely, Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and Other .
Ancestry can be estimated by morphological or quantitative analysis and both of these methods are centered on the skull. Features of the skull, such as the general shape of the eye orbits, nasal aperture, dentition, and surrounding bone and the face, can offer indications of ancestry. Other features are more distinct, such as the scooped-out appearance of the lingual (tongue) side of the upper central incisors often found in individuals of Asian ancestry (so-called “shovel-shaped” incisors). But even indicators like this are not as clear as they may appear at first glance: Prehistoric Native Americans migrated into North America across the Bering Strait from Asia and some of them showed shovel-shaping on their incisors. In hopes of rendering ancestral assessment more objective, physical anthropologists sought metric means of categorizing human populations. Currently, these means con sist of numerous measurements that are then placed in formulae derived from analysis of known populations. While fairly accurate, these formulae suffer from being based on historically small samples that are not necessarily representative of modern popula tions. These concerns aside, given a complete skull or cranium, ancestral affiliation can be assessed with enough accuracy to make them useful for forensic investigations.
