I should know this but I don’t. Insead of taking the time to look it up, I thought I would send it out to the Dopers.
Is it possible to tell a persons race from their bones alone? If there were skulls from several differen’t races in front of me are there ways to tell what race they were from?
My first instinct is NO, simply because we are all homosapians with the same structure.
Enlightenment?
yes, the skeletal structures among races are indeed different, particularly in the cranium.
for instance, you will notice that the lower face of black people protrudes more than that of other races.
the forehead of a white person is more sloping than the upright forehead of a black person.
there are scads of anatomy books around, but i would rather go watch baraka than do research for you. : )
Very “iffy” question! Look at it from the view point of a TV forensic pathologist - the bones found in the USA, in a certain area and time you’d get a lot of hints and good ways to guess.
However, if you are in a “cross roads” area someplace in the world were several different peoples converge, the answers might be a lot more difficult.
One of the greatest differences has to do with those changes that helped the species in different climates. Cheek bones in the Eskimo and Asian populations were both cold adapted but to two different kinds of cold conditions.
The answer is no. At the extremes of any population group, there are morphological differences which may help suggest ancestry, but they are slight and highly subjective. One of the things which caused racial science to collapse as a “science” was the very fact that fixed boundaries proved impossible to establish. Contrary to Kilgore Trout, one can not tell with certitude the “race” of a person – modern biological texts will tell you that regardless of the old racist saw about sloped foreheads on “blacks”-- except for extreme types. However in between lies the vast number of us.
Your statement is surprising (to me) given that IIRC I have heard that forensic pathologists can establish race well beyond a (slight and subjective) SWAG by skull and skeletal characteristics. Your point is well taken that it is a slippery slope but I thought there were subtle but definite differences in skeletal characteristics between african, asian and european population groups.
Yes, it is possible. Each race has certain characteristics that differ from the others, like shape of nasal openings, eye sockets, cheekbones, etc. If you don’t have the skull, it is much more difficult but not always impossible.
If the person is of mixed racial background it is much more difficult but again, not impossible.
You didn’t ask, but it is also possible to tell sex differences via skeletal remains and if a woman, if she’s ever been pregnant or had children.
A book that does a good job of explaining this is “Bones - A Forensic Detective’s Casebook” by Douglas Ubelaker.
–tygre, the former anthropology minor
Yes, they can with some degree of accuracy.
American indians and asians have more prodomently placed cheekbones.
People of African decent tend to have denser bone mass and their jaws are larger. Is why blacks have their wisdom teeth removes less often than other races.
“dead men do tell tale” by William Maples PhD is also a great book in regards to forensic anthropology.
and Tygre aslo posted another great book By Ubelaker.
Alas, it as been 10 years since I studied this subject in college an that is the best information I can remember.
Osip
actually, it is white people that have a sloping forehead. the frontal eminence of black people is more vertical.
can you provide us with some quotes?
In high school biology, my class determined the race of the skeleton that is included with all biology classrooms by examining the sacrum. There was a little formula for determining the sacral index using two or three specific measurements. We then referenced a chart that had different races divided by sacral index. 11 of 12 lab groups determined that the skeleton was most likely a woman from India. After the results were in, our teacher told us that this was likely correct because most anatomical skeletons purchased at the time this one was were retrieved from the Ganges River. Ewwwww!!!
True or not, how is a statement about the shape of a group’s forehead racist? I can see that attributing it to an inferior brain or something would be highly offensive, but how is saying “blacks have vertical foreheads” any different from saying “blacks have dark skin”?
it’s not at all, chronos. but there are always people who are oversensitive and need to feel righteous whenever race is mentioned.
Ok found something else. While reading “dead men do tell tales” by Dr Maples he is talking about the effect of high tempeurature on the human skeleton.From his chapter titled “flames and Urns” He says " When the body comes out of the retort in this calcined condition, a trained Osteologist can stand a few feet away, glance at the remains as they emerge, and tell the crematory employees the race,sex and approximate age of the deceased. In other words the identifying characteristics are still there. Fire does not destroy them."
What these characteristics are I ahve yet to find in print. Considering he is a distinguished professor of the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the florida Museum of Natural History and a former president of the American Board of Forensic ANthropology. I can assume he knows his stuff.
Osip