NCJ Number
219241
Journal
Journal of Forensic Sciences Volume: 52 Issue: 4 Dated: July 2007 Pages: 774-778
Date Published
July 2007
Length
5 pages
Annotation
This experiment tested a recently published method for estimating adult age from observations of skeletal elements based on the acetabulum (the cup-shaped socket of the hipbone) and Bayesian inference, developed using the Coimbra collection (Portugal).
Abstract
The study found that the observations of the fused acetabulum can be used to make accurate estimates of age for adults of any age in Western European populations, with less accurate estimates when a more distant reference collection is used. These estimations are generally more accurate than those based on observation of other areas of the pelvis formerly used for this purpose. The acetabulum is especially useful because its relevant structure tends to remain well-preserved long after death. Thus, more studies of the acetabulum as an indicator of age at death should be conducted in order to better understand how the acetabulum changes during the aging process in different populations. Males with fused acetabulum were used in this study. The bone materials came from four collections of human skeletal remains from Western Europe. Each specimen's sex, age-at-death, and biological origin were known. The wide range in ages enabled the examination of a broad spectrum of the structural variation of the fused acetabulum through the human life span. Age at death was estimated in four different ways with different collections for test and reference. 2 tables, 7 figures, and 31 references