How Can We Determine the Sex of Prehistoric Skeletons? This new scientific method provides an answer

Researchers from the universities of Valladolid, Murcia, Burgos, and Uppsala (Sweden) have developed a scientific method to determine the sex of prehistoric skeletons based on the so-called long bones - humeri, ulnae, radii, femora, and tibiae - with 95% accuracy.
Source: EFE

 

Sonia Díaz Navarro, a researcher at the University of Valladolid (UVa), led a study that analysed 109 articulated skeletons from the Camino de Molino site (3rd millennium BC) in Murcia, as reported by UVa in a statement on Friday.
 
The results of this study are a set of discriminant functions and classification models to determine sex through analysis and machine learning techniques applied to long bones.
 
Published in the prestigious ‘Journal of Archaeological Sciences Reports’, the study compared different diagnostic techniques for sex determination in long bones and tested the validity of machine learning on prehistoric samples with "excellent results".
 
 
The Camino del Molino Site
 
Camino del Molino, in the municipality of Caravaca de la Cruz (Region of Murcia), is a Copper Age burial site dating to the 3rd millennium BC, preserving the largest collection of skeletons from this period.

This tomb contained 1,348 individuals, of both sexes and all ages, making it "the largest prehistoric cemetery documented to date”.
 
The preservation of 168 articulated adult skeletons allowed for the first exhaustive osteometric analysis of women and men in this tomb to assess sexual dimorphism, i.e., the differences in size between women and men.
 
Image of archaeologists working at the site of Camino del Molino in Caravaca, Murcia. EFE/Juan Francisco Moreno
 
 
The Importance of Long Bones
 
In this context, researcher Sonia Díaz Navarro from UVa explained that long bones are an "excellent alternative for sex estimation" when more sexually dimorphic anatomical parts, such as the skull or pelvis, are not preserved or are heavily altered, something common in prehistoric burials.
 
These conditions make it particularly challenging to estimate the sex of individuals in these contexts, a fundamental aspect of bioarchaeological studies to define a specific demographic group or classify isolated remains.
 
Thus, the work aims to overcome the scarcity of methods that can be applied to estimate the sex of the large volume of isolated remains from Camino del Molino and other Mediterranean prehistoric skeletal series from the Late Prehistoric period with high biological affinity and similar environmental conditions.
 

SOURCE: EFE - FULL ARTICLE