Canine sex estimation and sexual dimorphism in the collection of identified skeletons of the University of Coimbra, with an application in a Roman cemetery from Faro, Portugal

Abstract

Sexual estimation of human remains is an aspect of great importance for the characterizationof demographic profiles in bioarcheology and to identify individuals inforensic cases. The aims of this paper are threefold: to generate population‐specificformulae for sex estimation based on permanent canine metrics, to evaluate thedental sexual dimorphism, and to develop a Bayesian approach in a sample of 115individuals from the documented human sample housed in the University of Coimbra(Portugal). Discriminant functions and logistic regression equations were developed,and posterior probabilities were calculated. Formulae offered high percentages of correctsex assignation (77.42?86.54% for the discriminant functions and 81.63?85.18%for the logistic regression), whereas posterior probabilities ranged between 0.71 and0.85. The procedures were then applied in an archaeological sample of 32 individualsfrom the Roman (I‐III century AC) cemetery of Ossonoba Romana (Faro, Portugal) inorder to test the relevance of their use in this geographical‐related sample. The resultsof correct estimation are higher than 75% for three formulae and four combinationsof variables in the Bayesian approach. Although phenotypic variation may be a factorinfluencing the sex estimations, canine odontometrics are powerful tools whenpreviously tested and can increase the amount of data obtained for paleodemographicand forensic purposes. In this case, some of the methods developed for the modernsample can be used in archaeological samples and in spatial and temporal‐relatedskeletal collections.