ANCESTRAL ESTIMATION
Estimating the ethnicity or ancestry of an individual from his or her hairs is just that: an estimate. A study of forensic hair examiner trainees conducted by one of the authors (MMH) showed that their accuracy for racial estimation on a standard set of tests was 85%, not bad for trainees, considering that this was based on a microscopical examination alone. Anthropologists can be more accurate using skeletal measurements, but they use several measurements on different bones and then compare them to a large population of similar measurements. This approach makes the anthropologists’ estimate more accurate, but regrettably these are not options for microscopical hair examinations. The general morphology and color of a hair can give an indication of a person’s ancestry. Humans are more variable from one to another in their hair morphology than any other primate. This variation tends to correlate with a person’s ancestry (see Table 1) although it is not an exact correlation. For simplicity and accuracy, three main ancestral groups are used: Europeans, Africans, and Asians. In the older anthropological and forensic literature, these groups were referred to as, respectively, Caucasoids, Negroids, and Mongoloids; these terms are archaic now and should prob ably not be used. They are no better at describing the intended populations than the geographic terms listed previously—Caucasoid/European hair descriptions include some Hispanics and peoples of the Middle East, for example—but the geographic terms are as accurate and less potentially offensive. Typically, head and pubic hairs provide the clearest evidence for ancestral estimates. It may be possible with certain other hairs, especially facial hairs, but body hairs should be viewed with a cautious eye. Asians, for example, have less body hair than other populations and, in some areas, may have none. Some examiners include a fourth category: mixed race. Technically, everyone is “mixed race,” so this term is a misnomer; “other” might be more accurate. In one study, two researchers, one experienced in hair examinations (>14 years) and one not as experienced (<1 year), did a blind study of hair from children of known “mixed” marriages. Both researchers showed positive correlation between non-Black ancestral assessment and increasing European ancestry. The less experienced examiner had a correlation of 0.23 (1.0 being a perfect 1:1 correlation), whereas the experienced examiner had a stronger correlation of 0.61. This point is important to remember: Just because an examiner estimates a hair to be from a person of a certain ancestry doesn’t mean that is how that person identifies himself or herself racially.
Table 1 Various Characteristics of Hair by Ancestry
