Forensic anthropology serves the investigative and judicial communities by analysing human remains for medico-legal purposes such as the investigation of homicide, human trafficking, mass disasters and war crimes.
Within this field, the accurate estimation of stature in life can meaningfully contribute to the positive identification of skeletal remains of unknown individuals. Regression equations are most commonly used to estimate stature and have been derived for numerous bones including the femur, tibia, humerus and pelvic girdle, but almost all of the methods are based on data from next-of-kin or observer-identified adult ‘white European’ populations from the first half of the 20thC. There is a pressing need for more inclusive, recent, datasets, and in particular from populations of African and Asian ancestry. This project will extract long bone lengths (femur, tibia, humerus) from a sample of the ALSPAC archive of whole body DXA scans, selected to represent mother-assessed ethnicity cohorts. These data will then be used to derive new stature regression equations for a) age 9 juveniles and b) age 17 young adults across the ethnicity cohorts; these equations will then be applied to an African forensic case which is ongoing (PI: Kate Robson Brown). This research is designed to be achievable in 12 months full time, starting in September 2015, in order to facilitate it running as an MPhil project for Ms Khadija Ali under supervision of Kate Robson Brown, and contributing to this case.