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Home / History / Archaeology / Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology (Russian): Судебная археология и антропология (русскоязычная версия) / Определение половой принадлежности по костям скелета

Определение половой принадлежности по костям скелета

Определение пола имеет решающее значение для точной идентификации.
Доктор Ребекка Гоуленд описывает несколько методов оценки пола по останкам скелета.
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9.1
Once you have your skeleton in the lab and you’ve laid it out in anatomical position, and you’ve recorded all the bones that are present, the first aspect of identity that you want to establish is sex. One of the reasons that you do this first is because some of the other techniques are sex dependent, and we only sex the skeletal remains of adult individuals. This is because establishing sex of non-adults has been shown to be unreliable. There are a number of techniques that have been developed, but when they’ve been applied to different populations their reliability is not so strong.
44.1
Part of the reason for this is that sexual diamorphism, so the differences between males and females, does vary slightly between different populations. So this can be confusing if you’re dealing with juvenile remains. So today, we’re just going to focus on establishing the sex of adult skeletons. The pelvis is the most accurate part of the skeleton for sex determination. And there are a number of morphological differences between males and females. Here we have a male pelvis. The differences between male and female pelves are the most accurate way of determining sex in individuals. You will see that the male pelvis overall is much narrower and steeper, whereas the female pelvis is much shallower and broader.
90.3
If we look at this angle here, beneath the pubic bone, we’ll see it’s much narrower in males than it is in females. There are a number of other individual features. And I’ll go through each of these in turn with you. For comparison, here we have a female pelvis. And as you can see, it’s much shallower and broader, the subpubic angle is much wider, and the length of the pubis is much longer. And this is to increase the size of the pelvic inlet and pelvic outlet to facilitate childbirth. The first feature that I want to show you is the sciatic notch. And you’ll see here on this female pelvis that it’s very wide and V-shaped.
130.1
If we take a look at the male pelvis, you’ll see that it’s deeper, narrower and more U-shaped. I’ve included here an intermediate example. This one I’ve included because it’s important to remember that these features exist on a sliding scale, from very feminine, to intermediate, to very masculine. If you do have an intermediate sciatic notch, and you’re not sure whether it’s male or female, it’s useful to use the composite arc. Here, you follow the edge of the sciatic notch around the superior surface of the auricular surface. In males, you’ll see that it forms a continuous arch.
168.8
When you try to do this in females, you’ll see that it misses the superior surface of the auricular surface, and it forms almost two separate arches. This is another female pelvis and the feature that I want to show you is called the pre-auricular sulcus, that’s this concavity underneath the auricular surface. This feature isn’t present in all females, but when it is, it tends to be quite sharp and quite deep. On males, you rarely see it, but if you do see it, it tends only to be a very shallow concavity. Here are fragments of a female pubis and a male pubis. On the female, you can see that the subpubic angle is quite wide and U-shaped.
202.9
On the male you can see that it’s quite narrow and V-shaped. On the female you can see that the angle extends backwards from the pubic symphysis, whereas on the male it just extends downwards. Another feature to look at is called the ventral arc. On females, this is this flattened triangular area here on the anterior or front surface. On males, this is not present. So overall, the female pelvis is much more gracile than the male in terms of the individual features, they tend to be much sharper. Another feature to look at is the length of what’s called the ilio-pubic ramus.
252.8
You’ll see that it’s much longer, if we were comparing it to the diameter of the acetabulum- the hip socket here, this is much longer. If we look at the male pelvis, it’s much shorter and is approximately equal to the diameter of the hip socket. Overall, these elongated features of the female are about creating a larger space to help with childbirth. The skull is also very useful for determining sex in skeletal remains. Overall, the male skull tends to be more robust and larger than the female skull, whose features tend to be a bit more gracile. I’ll go through a number of the individual features of the skull with you that are useful in terms of determining sex.
304.1
So here we have a male skull and you’ll notice that the eye sockets are much squarer than the female. On the female, they tend to be more rounded and irregular. The rims of the orbit as well on the males tends to be thicker and blunter, whereas on the females, you can see that they’re actually quite sharp. Another key feature is known as the supraorbital ridge or the brow ridge. As you can see, it’s much more defined on the male and here on the female, it’s quite smooth. The center of this ridge is referred to as the glabella, and you can see that this is quite pronounced here.
343.9
Whereas on the female, it tends to be much less pronounced and as you can see on this female, it’s completely absent. Here we have a male and a female skull viewed from the side. Now you can see that the female skull is much smaller than the male. One feature you can also see is that the forehead of this female tends to be a little bit more upright, whereas the forehead of the male tends to slope slightly further backwards. When we look at the mastoid process, which is this feature here, you can see that the female mastoid process is much smaller than the male.
379
The other feature that you can see is this ridge here above the mastoid process in the male, which is quite pronounced. This is the posterior zygomatic arch. If we look at the female, you can see that it’s smooth above the mastoid process and there’s no pronounced ridge. These are the same skulls viewed from behind. As you can see on this male skull, we’ve got a very pronounced region here. This is called the nuchal crest. When we look at the female, you can see that it’s very smooth here. These features are related to musculature; they’re essentially muscle attachment points. As a result of this, you do get a great deal of variety within and between different populations.
421.8
So much like the pelvis, the features that we’re looking at form on a sliding scale from very masculine to very feminine. And these differences will vary between different populations as well. As a consequence, sex determination in the skull tends to be less accurate than it is for the pelvis because it is influenced by factors such as lifestyle-so diet, activities, and that interaction with genetics, whereas sexual dimorphism in the pelvis relates to functional morphology linked to childbirth. Here we have two femora and it’s tempting to think that the larger one is going to be male, and the smaller one is going to be female. In this instance, that is the case but it’s not always.
464
We do have large females and small males, and there is a lot of overlap between males and females within a population. When we’re measuring the femora, we can look at the length, and we can look at the diameter of the femoral head, and we can look at the width of the condyles. And we can look to see whether these fall into a female or a male category. But again, you must be conscious of the fact that there is a lot of overlap between males and females. And I would be very cautious about assigning sex on the basis of size alone. So we’ve gone through the different features for establishing sex from the skeleton.
507.3
One of the things that I think is really important to remember is that sexual dimorphsim does vary slightly between different populations. So you will have to accommodate this difference when you’re looking at your own skeletal assemblage. The other thing to remember is that sexual dimorphism is on a sliding scale from ‘very feminine’, ‘feminine’, ‘intermediate’, ‘probable male’, ‘male’. Skeletons don’t just fall neatly into two discrete categories. So again, if you remember this when you’re establishing sex in your skeletal assemblage. In the next section, we’re going to focus on estimating the age-at-death of infant and juvenile skeletal remains and the variety of techniques that we can use for estimating age-at-death.

Пол — одна из первых биологических характеристик, оцениваемых по скелетированным останкам взрослого человека. Дело в том, что некоторые методы оценки других характеристик, необходимых для установления личности, в том числе возраста на момент смерти и роста, требуют наличия информации о поле. Кроме того, в судебной медицине сведения о поле позволяют при установлении личности сразу же исключить значительную долю кандидатур. Несмотря на то что для определения пола по скелетированным останкам младенцев и других несовершеннолетних разработан ряд макроскопических методов, современные стандарты, как правило, не рекомендуют их применять.

Это объясняется тем, что такие методы показали низкую достоверность применительно к скелетированным останкам, относящимся к разным периодам и географическим регионам. Для определения пола детей можно использовать анализ ДНК и анализ пептидов (что обсуждается в ходе 5-й недели). Пол определяется на основе исследования форм и размеров определенных элементов скелета, для которых характерен половой диморфизм. Различия между мужским и женским скелетом являются следствием совокупности генетических факторов, различий гормонального фона, культуры и окружающей среды. В случае взрослых индивидов, у которых развитие скелета завершилось, определение пола по скелетированным останкам считается надежным. Однако важно отметить, что особенности скелета, отражающие признаки полового диморфизма, не являются полярными: морфологические признаки на скелете не всегда можно однозначно отнести к двум четко разделенным категориям. Напротив: особенности, значимые для определения пола, существуют в рамках некоторого непрерывного спектра — от выраженно женских до промежуточных и выраженно мужских. Как следствие, при определении половой принадлежности скелета в рамках антропологического исследования, как правило, используют следующие пять категорий:

  • женский;
  • вероятно женский;
  • неопределенный;
  • вероятно мужской;
  • мужской.

Разные выборки скелетированных останков могут отличаться по наблюдаемому диапазону полового диморфизма. Например, выборки скелетированных останков разных периодов или из разных географических регионов могут отличаться по тому, какие именно «мужские» и «женские» черты в них проявляются. Эти различия обусловлены совокупностью социальных, внешних и наследственных факторов.

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Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology (Russian): Судебная археология и антропология (русскоязычная версия)

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Американская академия судебной медицины и криминалистики (The American Academy of Forensic Sciences) разработала Утвержденный американский национальный стандарт по определению пола в судебной антропологии.

The American Academy of Forensic Sciences has produced an Approved American National Standard for sex estimation in forensic anthropology.

Просмотрев это видео, переходите к следующим этапам, в которых более подробно описаны методы определения пола по тазовой кости (os coxae) и черепу.

Примечание о трансгендерах, транссексуалах и интерсексуалах.

В предыдущий раз, когда проводился этот курс, нам поступило множество вопросов о трансгендерах, транссексуалах и интерсексах. В настоящем курсе приводятся и рассматриваются методы, которые утверждают двоичность (исходят из позиций бинарности) биологического пола (мужского и женского). При этом следует иметь в виду, что биологический пол является сложной категорией без столь однозначного разделения на то, что ранее обозначалось как «мужской» и «женский» пол. Сообщество судебных экспертов и криминалистов начало адаптировать свои взгляды; методы необходимо пересмотреть, чтобы обеспечить охват и репрезентативность для более широких категорий населения. Этот процесс продолжается, причем для введения новых определений того, что рассматривается как биологический пол, и исследований по определению биологического пола в судебной медицине, могут потребоваться годы.

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