Abstract
The Colombian armed conflict has been catalogued not only as the longest civil war in the western hemisphere, but also as having one of the highest indexes of missing persons. Among the several challenges faced by forensic practitioners in Colombia, the commingling of human remains has been recognised as one of the most difficult to approach. The method of osteometric sorting described by Byrd and Adams and Byrd (2008) has proven relevant as a powerful tool to aid in the reassociation process of skeletal structures. The aim of this research was to evaluate the three osteometric sorting models developed by Byrd (2008) (paired elements, articulating bone portions and other bone portions) in a sample of modern Colombian individuals. A set of 39 linear measurements was recorded from a sample of 100 individuals (47 females and 53 males aged between 20 and 74 and 18 and 77 years, respectively), which was used to create a reference sample database. A different subset of eight individuals (five females aged between 23 and 48 years, and three males aged between 27 and 43 years) was employed to randomly create six small-scale commingled assemblages for the purposes of testing the osteometric sorting models. Results demonstrate that this method has significant potential for use in the Colombian forensic context.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank to all the staff members of National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Bogotá, Colombia which have facilitated and granted the access and use of data from the Skeletal Reference Collection from Colombian Population. Also, the authors thank to the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification of the University of Dundee for their valuable help while conducting this research.
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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Research involving human participants
Permission for the use and data gathering from the skeletal collection was approved by the Scientific Research Committee of the NILMFS and the Ethics Committee of the University of Dundee. Both institutions granted their permission in accordance with national and international ethical standards.
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Appendices
Appendix 1. List of sources and names of variables used in this study
Appendix 2. List of measurement values of the skeletal elements used for the comparisons in this study
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Rodríguez, J.M.G., Hackman, L., Martínez, W. et al. Osteometric sorting of skeletal elements from a sample of modern Colombians: a pilot study. Int J Legal Med 130, 541–550 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-015-1142-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-015-1142-1