Centre for Forensic Science, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia.
Forensic Sci Int. 2010 Oct 10;202(1-3):110.e1-5. doi: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2010.05.009. Epub 2010 Jun 17.
Forensic anthropologists are frequently required to verify the human origin of complete and partial skeletal remains. This determination, however, can be difficult for bone fragments with few or no distinctive morphological markers. Current methods of distinguishing human from non-human bone fragments include microscopic, immunological and DNA testing, which are each limited to some degree (e.g. time consuming and expensive). The purpose of this study is to investigate an alternative morphometric approach to quantify the external structure of human long bones (humeri, femora, and tibiae) compared to quadrupedal (sheep, dog, and pig) and bipedal (kangaroo and emu) animals common to Australia. Eight traditional measurements were taken on a sample of 50 human and at least 10 of each of the five animal species; measurements were then analysed using linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The results expectedly indicate enough variation between species to correctly assign an unknown bone as that of a human or non-human, with cross-validated classification accuracy of 95% or better. More importantly, however, the technique also proved to be accurate if only a fragment of the diaphysis is analysed; classification accuracy 63-99%. The results of this study, therefore, outline a forensically useful non-invasive method to distinguish human from animal bones.
法医人类学家经常需要验证完整和部分骨骼遗骸的人类起源。然而，对于具有很少或没有明显形态学标记的骨碎片，这种确定可能很困难。目前区分人类和非人类骨碎片的方法包括微观、免疫学和 DNA 测试，但每种方法都在某种程度上受到限制（例如耗时且昂贵）。本研究的目的是调查一种替代形态计量学方法，以定量比较澳大利亚常见的四足（绵羊、狗和猪）和两足（袋鼠和鸸鹋）动物与人的长骨（肱骨、股骨和胫骨）的外部结构。对 50 个人类样本和至少 10 个每种动物的样本进行了 8 种传统测量；然后使用线性判别分析（LDA）对测量结果进行分析。结果表明，物种之间有足够的差异，可以正确地将未知的骨头分配为人类或非人类，交叉验证的分类准确率为 95%或更高。然而，更重要的是，如果只分析骨干的一部分，该技术也被证明是准确的；分类准确率为 63-99%。因此，这项研究的结果概述了一种用于从动物骨骼中区分人类骨骼的具有法医学用途的非侵入性方法。
