[Proportions of the femur and humerus in relation to bone length]

Taking as a starting point the known fact that the vertical proportions of man are dependent upon stature, a study has been made to investigate if the relations between individual segments of long tubular bones are also dependent upon overall bone length. For these investigations, use was made of 356 human femurs of unknown sex, which were obtained from the bone collection of the Institute of Anatomy (Kurp 1979), and 70 human humeri of known sex (Kropf 1979), which were obtained from the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminology, Karl Marx University at Leipzig, and which had already been measured in connection with problems of forensic osteology. There were established relations between defined partial lengths, with the most suitable ones being selected and represented graphically. The severity of relationship was additionally determined by means of correlation and regression analyses, respectively. It was possible to show that the relative proportion of segment no. 4 (distance between the proximal point of the intercondylar fossa of the femur and the distal point of the medial condyle of the femur) and segment no. 5 (distance between the proximal point of the greater trochanter and the midpoint of the lesser trochanter) constantly decreases with the overall length of the femur. The quotient of diaphysial size and bone length decreases as the length of the humerus increases. The proportion of compacta in the total cross-sectional area in the mid-diaphysis becomes greater and greater as the length of the humerus increases. The total cross-sectional area and the compacta cross-section area in the middle of the humeral diaphysis tend to change with the overall bone length in that longer female and male humeri have larger total cross-sectional and compacta cross-section areas than shorter humeri of the same sex.