Quantification of the dental arch and its use in estimating ancestry
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Abstract
One role of forensic anthropologists is to create a biological profile to help
identify remains. This includes estimating ancestry. Many morphological and metrical
methods of ancestry estimation have been created and utilized. This study was aimed at
created a simple, metrical analysis of dental arch size and shape to aid in ancestry
estimation. Maximum length and width of over 700 dental casts (both maxillary and
mandibular) were recorded and statistically analyzed by one-way ANOVA.
Measurements were taken using points on teeth rather than on the fragile bone of the
maxilla and mandible. It was found that ancestry does affect the size of the maxillary
arch but not the mandibular one, but discriminant function analysis showed that ancestry
estimation is not possible with the present set of data for either the maxilla or the
mandible. Further research will need to be conducted with larger sample sizes of certain
populations in order to improve ancestry estimation using this method.
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Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International