Kinship relationships and morphological features of the human skeleton in genealogically documented osteological assemblages: use in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology.

The influence of biological relationships on the morphology of the human skeleton is a current theme in bioarchaeology and forensic research. Whether it is the discovery of kinship relationships in an anonymous cemetery or the question of individual identification based on familial similarity, research is limited by a number of factors. Above all, there is the shortage of osteological assemblages with genealogical documentation. Most such samples also include only a small number of individuals, and thus the number of different degrees of their relatedness is limited. Related to this is the lack or absence of methods suitable for either the exact expression of the degree of morphological similarity between individuals or the statistical evaluation of results. However, for this dissertation an opportunity arose to analyze several osteological assemblages with genealogical documentation from the 17th to 20th centuries, comprising almost one hundred individuals. This represents one of the largest such units in the world to date. The individual samples also include several cases of consanguineous marriages with subsequent generations. The aim of the first part of the dissertation is to propose new methodological approaches to expressing the degree of similarity of individuals based on different types of..