"...it is clear that race does mean different things to different people. In the context of forensic anthropology, the term race is unambiguous."
- Stan Rhine, PhD
I looked at the different skulls that were presented on this website and being a person of multiple human variation, I wondered if that fact would be apparent by looking at my skull. It seems that for forensic purposes, one of the course objectives is to teach the students how to identify "race" differences in human skulls. My question is, how credible is this when mixed people are taken into consideration?
"...it is clear that race does mean different things to different people. In the context of forensic anthropology, the term race is unambiguous."
- Stan Rhine, PhD
I looked at the different skulls that were presented on this website and being a person of multiple human variation, I wondered if that fact would be apparent by looking at my skull. It seems that for forensic purposes, one of the course objectives is to teach the students how to identify "race" differences in human skulls. My question is, how credible is this when mixed people are taken into consideration?
Hi,
Well. More than once the forensic anthropologist have failed to identify people by "race". So it is not a very sure science at all.
In countries where the population is mixed there are all the graduations in between between those skulls.
Forensic anthropologists make a living providing “racially” framed answers to the peculiar demands of the U.S. justice system. As craniofacial anthropometrist George W. Gill puts it, “I have been able to prove to myself over the years, in actual legal cases, that I am more accurate at assessing race from [bone measurements] than from looking at living people standing before me.” Nevertheless, even these professionals admit when pressed that, “If the police want race, I give them race. Maybe afterward, when we’re having a beer, we can have a discussion about what race really means.” It is a cliché among forensic anthropologists that the only way to tell if an unidentified corpse is Hispanic, rather than Black with lots of European genetic admixture, is to search the pockets for a shopping list written in Spanish. The point is that although the bio-race paradigm has been found useless or worse by biologists, geneticists, and physical anthropologists as a classification scheme for human variation, a few must continue to reify it because society demands it.
There are three skull types on this site, Negroid, Caucasoid, and American Indian. I notice that there isn't a Mestizo or Mulatto skull type. A person named - Stan Rhine, PhD is quoted:
"...it is clear that race does mean different things to different people. In the context of forensic anthropology, the term race is unambiguous."
I don't see how this can be a true statement given that there is so much variation in any given population and even more so as one population seamlessly blends into another within the human continuum.
"...it is clear that race does mean different things to different people. In the context of forensic anthropology, the term race is unambiguous."
- Stan Rhine, PhD
I looked at the different skulls that were presented on this website and being a person of multiple human variation, I wondered if that fact would be apparent by looking at my skull. It seems that for forensic purposes, one of the course objectives is to teach the students how to identify "race" differences in human skulls. My question is, how credible is this when mixed people are taken into consideration?
bone structure, like facial features are still phenotypes. So based on whatever 'racial' paradigms one has the shoe will fit. But like visual phenotype, bone structure can be just as innacurate.
I wonder how accurate a Forensic Anthropologist would be in differentiating a person who has a look through cline versus a person who has a look through admixture. Like say a KhoiSan versus a Afro-Asian. Or a Libyan and a Mulatto.
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1057 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Tue 28 Nov 2006 16:30 Post subject:
Frank wrote:
As craniofacial anthropometrist George W. Gill puts it, “I have been able to prove to myself over the years, in actual legal cases, that I am more accurate at assessing race from [bone measurements] than from looking at living people standing before me.”
Gill scares me a little. I recall seeing an interview with him, and he mentioned he was certain he'd be able to cranially detect the hidden "race" of people who were passing. Good Grief! But I had already known about him, because I read Frank's article on Interracial Voice a long time ago.
From : Bernard Ortiz de Montellano
Sent : Tuesday, November 28, 2006 1:13 AM
To : Jaime Pretell
Subject : forensics and race
Forensics are very weak in identifiying race see:
keyword-race;keyword-africa;keyword-forensic
George Armelagos and Dennis P. Van Gerven. 2003. "A Century of Skeletal Biology and Paleopathology: Contrasts, Contradictions, and Conflicts," American Anthropologist 105 (#1): 53-64
"Goodman (1997) demonstrated that the 85-90 percent accuracy claimed by forensic anthropologists is seriously misleading. High levels of accuracy can be achieved only when the skulls meet extremely limiting criteria. For example, Giles and Elliot's (1962) discriminant function formula is based on a reference sample of known composition, and it can indeed achieve a 85-90 percent accuracy. This level of accuracy is reached only when tested against additional specimens from the same reference sample. When applied to independent samples of known composition (the true measure of its success), the method is less than 20 percent accurate (Goodman 1997)-- a figure that hardly inspires confidence in forensic anthropology's ability to race a skull notwithstanding Gill's confidence.
Poor performance has not disabused forensic anthropologist [sic] from selling the method. Fordisc 2.0 (Ousley and Jantz 1996) is a computer program designed to diagnose any skull into one of Howell's geographic populations. The program, however, is seriously flawed (Kosiba 2000). When applied to a cranial [sic] from a known African population (Belcher et al. 2002; Leathers et al. 2002), some fifty percent were placed in non-African categories. The failure is interesting if we allow ourselves to think beyond the applied box. The program forced a solution based on a priori racial criteria presumed (as all racial schemes do) to delimit patterns of real human variation. What we see with the African test is the result of an astounding mismatch between actual cranial variation and the variation modeled by racial constructs. As we have known for decades, so-called racial traits are nonconcordant, and the races we get are little more than a function of the trait or traits we use. Sadly the response has ben directed more toward fixing the program rather than fixing the approach.
*******
keyword-race;keyword-africa;keyword-forensic
Allan Goodman. 1997. "Bred in the Bone?" The Sciences (march/April): 20-25
p. 22. Like Snow, the authors of forensic texts and review articles typically maintain that the race of a skull can be correctly identified between 85 and 90percent of the time. The scientific reference for these estimates-- if cited as anything other than common knowledge-- is a single groundbreaking study by the physical anthropologists Eugene Giles, at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and Orville S. Elliot, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. In the early 1960s Giles and Elliot measured the skulls of modern, adult blacks and whites who had died in Missouri and Ohio, many of them at the turn of the century, as well as Native American skulls from a prehistoric site in Indian Knoll, Kentucky. Using a statistical equation known own as a discriminant function, they then identified a combination of eight measurements that could determine a skull's "race" once its sex was known. When Giles and Elliot applied the formula to additional skulls from the same collections, it a greed with the race assigned to the deceased at death between 80 and 90 percent of the time. To be useful, however, the formula has to work in places other than Missouri, Ohio and prehistoric Kentucky. I have found four retests of the Giles and Elliot method, and their results do not inspire confidence. Two of the retests restricted themselves to native American skulls: in one of them almost two-thirds of the skulls were correctly classified as Native Americans; in the second, only 31 percent were correctly classified. For the other two studies, in which the skulls were of mixed race, skulls were correctly identified as native American just 18.2 percent and 14.3 percent of the time. Thus in three of four tests, the formula proved less accurate than a random assignment of races to skulls-- not even good enough for government work.
Contemporary Native American skulls may be particularly hard to classify because the formula is based on a very old sample. But the four retests were carried out on complete crania that had already been sexed, a necessary prerequisite to determining race. Forensic anthropologists often have much less to go on.Moreover, native Americans are easier to classify than Hispanics or Southeast Asians, not to mention infants, children or adolescents of any race. At best, in other words, racial identifications are depressingly inaccurate. At worst, they are completely haphazard.
********
keyword-race;keyword-New World;keyword-craniometry
Ann H. Ross, Douglas H. Ubelaker, and Anthony B. Falsetti. 2003. "Craniometric Variation in the Americas," Human Biology 74: 807-818.
p. 816 .... However, our results, although preliminary and based on some groups with small sample sizes, indicate that there may have been much diversity among Latin American populations and that the Americas were much more heterogeneous than previously thought.
Interestingly, the morphological similarities between precontact Mexico and coastal Ecuador from Ayatlan and the dissimilarity to the Howells Peruvian sample seem to contradict conclusions by Ruhlen (1994) and others that south America was populated by a single migration from North America. These results also provide further support for the argument that different populations peopled the New World (Schurr et al 1999; Schurr and Wallace 1991). Since craniofacial morphological similarities to some degree reflect genetic relationships, we can further extrapolate that the morphological similarity between Mexico and coastal Ecuador may have been a result of early demic expansion concurring with the archaeological evidence of contact between Mexico and coastal Ecuador (Ubelaker 1987). In addition, the morphological dissimilarity of the precontact Cuban sample to the other American populations probably suggests a different origin.... However, the most recognized Antillean dispersal hypothesis is a direct jump by agriculturalists from Venezuela followed by dispersal into the Lesser Antilles westward (Keegan 1995; Moreira de Lima 1999). The FST results lend further support for the strong craniometric differentiation among Latin American and Caribbean populations. These FST are much greater than those obtained by Varela and Cocilovo (2002) for the Azapa Valley and coast of Chile and those obtained by Rothhammer et al. (1990) for living Aymara groups in Chile and Bolivia.
In the context of forensic anthropology, the term race is unambiguous."
I don't see how this can be a true statement given that there is so much variation in any given population and even more so as one population seamlessly blends into another within the human continuum.
Science is not a body of knowledge in the hands of its practitioners. It is a step-by-step method of examining the universe that is more successful than any accumulated wisdom. Anyone can learn the methodology of science and can thereby consider himself/herself a true scientist. Conversely, even people trained in the methodology sometimes ignore it to don a sham mantle of wisdom and affirm unprovable claims. When they do so, they are not acting as scientists.
As many have shown using the step-by-step process, where the claims of "racial" determination via craniofacial anthropometry are falsifiable, they have been thoroughly falsified. Where they have not been falsified it is because they are not falsifiable. Hence, by the rules of the game, "racial" determination via craniofacial anthropometry is not science at all, but a government-sponsored religion.
Joined: 04 May 2005 {Posts: 2021 } Location: santiago, chile
Posted: Sat 02 Dec 2006 04:04 Post subject: craneometry
I am afraid craneometry is following the same path that phrenology, astrology, and the reading of the lines of the hand.
No science at all.
There are some differences between races that are important from the medical point of view, like the relative frequencies of certain diseases, but almost anything else is just pseudo-science.
The fact is, how people can find differences between races when races can be defined with precision at all.
Joined: 04 May 2005 {Posts: 2021 } Location: santiago, chile
Posted: Sun 11 Feb 2007 02:45 Post subject:
What's the problem?
It just say that the variation of craneal measurements of Black plus the same variation in White Americans, covers the spectrum of variation of the Mulatoes in the U.S.
In other words, they don't need to manufacture special hats and gear for mixed peoples, because they the ones that already exist are enough for all them.
Now, variations in craneal measurements exist between "races", but is more a statistical diference rather than a sharp edged distinction. That's why I read in the paper, anyways.
Hello . I'm new . I'm interested in history and what can be learned through physical evidence when records are sparse .
Is some specific physical traits that , if a lot of them exist in a family might be reliable indicators of Native American Indian or Mongolian hereditary ?
Is some specific physical traits that , if a lot of them exist in a family might be reliable indicators of Native American Indian or Mongolian hereditary ?
It depends on what you mean by "reliable." In craniofacial anthropometry, Mongolians and Amerinds tend to have more prominent cheekbones. In DNA they tend to have mtDNA haplotypes A, B, C, or D.
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