Estimation of living stature from selected anthropometric (soft tissue) measurements: applications for forensic anthropology

Abstract

Estimation of living stature has obvious utility in the identification process. Typically, anthropologists estimate stature from the measurement of long bone length. This type of analysis is traditionally conducted on skeletonized or badly decomposed remains, so collection of the necessary bone measurements is relatively simple. As the role of anthropologists expands into medical examiner offices and mass fatality incidents, the analysis of fleshed bodies and body parts is a more common scenario. For stature estimation in these types of cases (e.g., analysis of body portions recovered from an aircraft crash site or from intentional dismemberment), the presence of soft tissue on the human remains would usually necessitate dissection to expose skeletal elements to derive metric data for stature estimation. In order to circumvent this step, this paper provides various formulae that allow for standard anthropometric (i.e., soft tissue) measurements to be used in place of skeletal measurements. Data were compiled from several anthropometric studies (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey [NHANES] and U.S. Army Anthropometric Survey [ANSUR]) and numerous regression models are presented. Results are compared between skeletal measurements and the anthropometric measurements from each study. It was found that the ANSUR models are similar to the skeletal models, while the NHANES models exhibit weaker correlation coefficients and higher standard errors. Overall, this study finds that stature estimates derived from anthropometric data provide good results and remove the necessity for dissection when working with fleshed body portions.