An inter- and intra-observer test of the computer program CRANID

The use of cranial analysis, through metric and/or morphological data, remains a popular method within biological anthropology and its subfields to allow for the analysis of an individual. These methods in-creasingly use multivariate statistics to empirically measure the degree of similarities between individuals and populations. CRANID is a piece of freeware which allows the user to estimate ancestry from 29 cranial measurements. This paper utilised a previously published dataset (Lee and Gerdau 2020 [29]) of cranial measurements to simulate multiple users estimating the ancestry for a single cranium of known origin. Only 32-68 % of the generated ancestry estimations were found to match the broad geographic region of the tested cranium depending on the statistical test. This paper also highlights aspects of CRANID's results that may make it harder for users to understand the results the program provides.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The use of cranial analysis in biological anthropology is a popular method to analyze individuals, using metric and/or morphological data and multivariate statistics to measure similarities between individuals and populations. This paper utilized a dataset to test the performance of CRANID software in estimating ancestry from cranial measurements, and found that only a portion of the generated estimations matched the geographic region of the tested cranium. The paper also highlights potential difficulties in interpreting CRANID results for users.