Morphometric Sex Estimation from the Hip Bone by Means of the HIP 1.1 Software

摘要

Estimation of biological sex from an unknown human skeleton is an important step in analyses of forensic and archaeological skeletal cases. Traditionally, the hip bone (pelvic or innominate bone) is preferentially used for this purpose due to its universal sexual dimorphism in shape resulting from its important reproductive functions of the bone in females. Despite much advancement in the field of sex estimation by means of modern morphometric approaches, no practical software had been available for sex estimation utilizing the shape analysis of the hip bone. We developed HIP 1.1 software (High-sensitive Innominate Processing) which is the second functional version of the software designed for morphometric estimation of sex of an unknown skeletal find based on the pelvic bone. The program works with standardized 2D images of bones from a desktop scanner and produces an assignment of sex to each case/skeletal remains using methods of traditional and geometric morphometry. One-dimensional and multi-dimensional statistics computing procedures and graphical procedures are based on the R software, distributed under the GNU (GPL) license, and its extending libraries from various authors.