Immature Bone Analysis

If a human femur was found, for example buried in a forest, a forensic anthropologist will need to examine it. However, if more bones were found there may be a more useful bone, or combination of bones, that would be more likely to provide pertinent information. There are many things that can be found out from a human femur, when it is first found and proved to be human anthropologists can use different observations, measurements and analysis techniques to categorise the bone and build up a biological profile of the individual. Some things that can be determined are the race, age, sex and stature of the individual. It is also possible to find out about the person’s diet, whether they have fractured their femur and even if they had certain diseases
The rate of decrease appears to be independent of temperature or rainfall but drops to zero for storage temperature t skewed towards one race and can be applied to all races. Because this method is destructive it would have to be performed after all other data is collected.
Problems with ageing occur if bone growth and fusion is temporarily stopped due to chronic stress. However, this should result in Harris lines (find ref) which indicates that the individual is older than the growth and fusion of their femur suggests, but, the anthropologist is then unable to accurately determine the age of the individual. If age is not determined narrowing down the list of potential individuals would be difficult.
Bodies are proportional; this allows for stature estimation from individual or multiple bones. The maximum length of the femur can be used to estimate stature by using a regression formula, as seen in table 5 (ref). These formulas are dependent on the individual’s race and sex so if either is unknown or incorrectly estimated the stature determined could be very inaccurate.
Troter and Gleser
The extensive overlap between categories, for example male and female, poses a huge problem as it can make coming to a conclusion regarding that characteristic very difficult or even impossible. Many of the characteristics affect one another so assessing all characteristics and collecting all of the necessary data before drawing any conclusions is very important. If a previously unknown piece of information is discovered it could impact the results drastically so everything would need to be reassessed taking into account the new piece of information. If one characteristic can’t be identified this could prevent another characteristic from being identified with as much accuracy, correctly or at all. This prevents the list of potential individuals from being narrowed down and means that identifying the individual is