Forensic anthropologists can try to identify …
Forensic anthropologists can try to identify a person’s race from a skull. Should they?
Debate over “ancestry estimation” has exploded in forensic anthropology
When an unidentified body arrives in the laboratory of Allysha Winburn, a forensic anthropologist at the University of West Florida, it’s her job to study the bones to help figure out who the person was when they were alive—to give the biological remains a social identity. “We have this vast population of possible missing persons the [remains] could match, and we need to narrow down that universe,” she says.
She measures the length of the limb bones to estimate height and examines the bones’ development to estimate age at death. She studies the shape of the pelvis for clues to the person’s likely sex. And, until recently, Winburn measured features of the skull, such as its overall length and the width of the nasal opening, to do what forensic anthropologists call ancestry estimation. By statistically comparing the measurements with those from skulls with known identities, she could predict the continental ancestry—and the commonly used racial categories that may correspond to it—that a person likely identified as when alive. In other words, she could predict whether they identified as Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American.
But Winburn, who is white, is now questioning whether she should continue to do so. And she’s not the only one: Over the past year, debate about ancestry estimation has exploded in U.S. forensic anthropology, with a flurry of papers examining its accuracy, interrogating its methods, and questioning its assumptions. A committee of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences’s standards board is now hammering out a new standard that would, if adopted, direct professionals away from racial categories and toward more specific social and biological populations, such as Japanese or Hmong instead of Asian. It will likely come to a vote by the end of the year, with potential implications for the hundreds of U.S. forensic anthropologists, as well as the more than 20,000 missing and nearly 14,000 unidentified people in the United States, and their loved ones. (continue)
