Sex determination from the acetabulum: test of a possible non-population-specific discriminant function equation

In a recent study of pelvic dimorphism, Steyn and Patriquin demonstrated that sex classification accuracies for a combined sample of South African blacks, South African whites, and Greeks living on Crete, differed very little from those obtained separately for the three groups. These results suggest that population-specific formulae may be unnecessary when using pelvic dimensions to discriminate sex, and according to the authors, the formulae derived in their study from a large and ethnically diverse sample should provide reliable standards for determining sex in a variety of populations. The purpose of the present study was to assess the accuracy of the discriminant function equation for acetabular diameter published by the aforementioned authors on a documented skeletal sample from France. The overall allocation accuracy obtained utilizing the pooled-group equation (84.1%) did not differ appreciably from that achieved using a sample-specific formula developed from the French dataset employed in this study (85.4%). This result is of practical importance to forensic anthropologists working in France, and elsewhere, particularly in situations where there is some question as to the population affinity of the skeletal remains. Future studies should continue to combine pelvic and non-pelvic data from disparate populations, to develop additional osteometric standards for discriminating sex with high accuracy across human groups.