Nonmetric Subadult Skeletal Sexing Traits: I. A Blind Test of the Accuracy of Eight Previously Proposed Methods Using Prehistoric Known-Sex

The accurate and reliable assignment of sex represents vital data used in both forensic anthropology and bioarchaeological research. Both metric and nonmetric techniques have been proposed for the evaluation of fetal (1–5) and juvenile (4–9) skeletal and dental re-mains. While recent metric techniques for identifying sex-based differences in skeletal morphology have shown promise (3), metric measurements of fetal and subadult skeletal elements have gener-ally been found to be of limited use for the correct assignment of fetal and subadult sex (3–5), while nonmetric skeletal traits have consistently been found to perform better than chance (5–10). This may be due, in part, to an inability to identify or reproduce useful metric measurements. In his seminal study, Weaver (5) examined elevation versus non-elevation of the auricular surface of the ilium among a large num-ber of dry skeletal elements for known-sex fetal and neonate re