Craniometric study for sex determination in a Thai population

Sex determination is an important step in biological identification from skeletal remains, especially in forensic circumstances. Many authors suggested that the morphological study was more subjective than the metric. There are various craniometric studies in different populations. They revealed that there was population-specific for the sex discriminant equation derived from each population. Thus, the present study aimed to evaluate sexual dimorphism and develop the discriminant function from 200 Thai skulls. Twenty-five standard cranial measurements were examined. The results revealed that males' cranium were statistically significant larger than females' in all measurements (P<0.05), except for minimum breadth of nasal bone. Sexual dimorphism index also expressed relatively high male/female ratio indicating great sexual dimorphism. The best practical equation for sex determination with six measurements (maximum cranial length, bizygomatic breadth, biauricular breadth, nasal height, biorbital breadth and right mastoid length) was derived from a stepwise discriminant method. This equation with 90.6% accuracy (91.1% in male and 90.0% in female) can provide valuable application utilizing in sex determination from skull in a Thai population.