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Stability of upper face sexual dimorphism in central European populations (Czech Republic) during the modern age

International Journal of Legal Medicine volume 132, pages 321–330 (2018)Cite this article

Abstract

One of the most fundamental issues in forensic anthropology is the determination of sex and population affinity based on various skeletal elements. Therefore, we compared the sexual dimorphism of the upper facial skeleton from a recent Czech population (twenty-first century) with that of a population from Early Modern Age Bohemia (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries). Methods of geometric morphometrics were applied. According to the results, sexual dimorphism in terms of size, shape, and form was statistically significant in both populations. The best results of sex estimation originated from analyses of form. Thus, both size and shape differences should be taken into account for determination of the sex. The accuracy of prediction achieved 91.1% for individuals in the recent population and 87.5% for individuals from the early modern population. Only minor differences were found between sexual dimorphism in the studied populations. We conclude that sexual dimorphism of the upper facial skeleton is stable during the relatively short time period.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Archaia Olomouc o.p.s. (Peter Kováčik) for the access to the skeletal collection of the Opava cemetery and Martin Horák for managing the CT imaging in Na Bulovce Hospital. This work was financially supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic under Grant No. 17-01878S and by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (DKRVO 2015/19, 2016/18 and 2017/18, 00023272).

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Viničná 7, 128 44, Prague 2, Czech Republic

    Šárka Bejdová, Ján Dupej & Jana Velemínská

  2. Department of Software and Computer Science Education, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Malostranské náměstí 25, 118 00, Prague 1, Czech Republic

    Ján Dupej & Václav Krajíček

  3. National Museum Prague, Václavské náměstí 68, 115 79, Prague 1, Czech Republic

    Petr Velemínský

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  1. Šárka Bejdová
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  2. Ján Dupej
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Correspondence to Šárka Bejdová.

Ethics declarations

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants from the current Czech population included in the study. In the case of individuals from the Early Modern Age population (retrospective data), formal consent is not required.

This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Bejdová, Š., Dupej, J., Krajíček, V. et al. Stability of upper face sexual dimorphism in central European populations (Czech Republic) during the modern age. Int J Legal Med 132, 321–330 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-017-1625-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-017-1625-3

Keywords

  • Sex estimation
  • Upper facial skeleton
  • Central Europe
  • Modern age population
  • Geometric morphometrics
  • Support vector machine