Sexual dimorphism of the tibia in contemporary Greeks, Italians, and Spanish: forensic implications

There are many population-specific studies around the world on sex estimation from skeletal remains. Of the long bones, the tibia has been an important one because it is commonly studied to assess population specificity of a long bone. However, the studies in Europe that use this bone for sex estimation remain limited. The aim of this study is to analyse the tibia in different populations of the southern Europe such as Greece, Italy, and Spain providing standards for sex estimation in a forensic context. In total, we analyzed tibiae of 157 Greek, 190 Italian, and 105 Spanish individuals. Standard osteometric measurements were taken and the data was analyzed using discriminant function statistics. Posterior probabilities were calculated for all produced formulae. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS subroutines. All measurements were significantly different between the sexes in all three populations and in the pooled sample. A discriminant function of the pooled sample for Southern Europeans resulted in about 88 % accuracy using all three variables. Over 43 % of the individuals were correctly classified at a 0.95 threshold. More work should be done including other Southern European populations to this database to further test the applicability of the method.