Craniometric determination of population affinity in South Africans

A vital aspect of skeletal analysis is the determination of population affi nity of an unknown individual. The aim of this paper is to develop discrimi nant function formulae to determine race from craniometric dimensions of So uth African blacks and whites. Skeletons used in this study came from the U niversities of the Witwatersrand and Pretoria. The sample is composed of 53 white males and 53 white females and 45 black males and 45 black females. Using 13 standard cranial and 4 mandibular dimensions, average accuracies o f 98% were obtained from the crania, which were much more discriminatory th an the mandibles (74% males, 87% females). When a "leave-one-out classifica tion" technique was applied to the sample to measure accuracy of multivaria te classification, this accuracy was about the same as obtained from the mu ltivariate function. A posterior probability of 0.80 or more was found in a s much as 96% of the sample, Stepwise discriminant function formulae for in complete remains (vault and face) were also derived. Prediction accuracy wa s considerably lower when North American based formulae were tested on the South Africans, indicating significant craniometric differences between the se populations.