Project IDENTIFICATION: Developing Accurate Identification Criteria for Hispanics.

摘要

The population considered Hispanic is the second-largest population group in the United States, and there are no skeletal collections with large numbers of Hispanics. If there are no criteria to accurately assess the sex and ancestry, two fundamental components of a biological profile, then Hispanic individuals will remain unidentified as they show up in forensic anthropological cases across the nation. The Hispanic population in the United States consists mainly of individuals of Mexican origin. There are no population-specific reference data or criteria available for Hispanics of Mexican origin. The goal of this project is threefold: 1) to obtain cranial and postcranial skeletal measurements from individuals from Mexico to establish a database of available reference data for further research and development; 2) to create sectioning points and classification functions for population-specific sex estimates applicable to the majority of Hispanics within the United States; and 3) to utilize traditional and geometric morphometric methods with the new reference data to explore morphological variation of among Mexicans, American Blacks, and Whites, to provide better classification accuracy in ancestry estimation. It is expected that new reference data from positively identified Mexicans will improve sex and ancestry estimation.