Identification of human or nonhuman skeletal remains is important in assisting the police
and law enforcement officers for the investigation of forensic cases. Identification of bone
can be difficult, especially in fragmented remains. It has been reported that 25 to 30% of
medicolegal cases, which involved nonhuman skeletal remains have been mistaken for
human. In such cases, histomorphometric method was used to identify human and
nonhuman skeletal remains. However, literature has shown that histomorphometric data for
human and nonhuman bone were insufficient. Additionally, age estimation in bone may
help in the identification of human individual, which can be done by using a
histomorphometric method. Age estimation is based on bone remodeling process, where
microstructural parameters have strong correlations with age. Literature showed that age
estimation has been done on the American and European populations. However, little work
has been done in the Asian population. The aims of this project were thus, to identify
human and nonhuman bone, and to estimate age in human bones by using
histomorphometric analysis. In this project, 64 human bones and 65 animal bones were
collected from the mortuary of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Medical Centre and the
Zoos in Malaysia, respectively. A standard bone preparation was used to prepare human
and nonhuman bone thin sections for histomorphometric assessment. Assessments were
made on the microstructural parameters such as cortical thickness, medullary cavity
diameter, osteon count, osteon diameter, osteon area, osteon perimeter, Haversian canal
diameter, Haversian canal area, Haversian canal perimeter, and Haversian lamella count per
osteon by using image analysis, and viewed under a transmitted light microscope. The
microstructural measurements showed significant differences between human and
nonhuman samples. The discriminant functions showed correct classification rates for
81.4% of cases, and the accuracy of identification was 96.9% for human and 66.2% for
animal. Human age estimation showed a standard error of estimate of 10.41 years,
comparable with those in the literature. This study project offers distinct advantages over
currently available histomorphometric methods for human and nonhuman identification and
human age estimation. This will have significant implications in the assessment of
fragmentary skeletal and forensic population samples for identification purposes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/4463 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Nor, Faridah M. |
| Contributors | Schutkowski, Holger, Buckberry, Jo |
| Publisher | University of Bradford, Department of Archaeological Sciences |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, doctoral, PhD |
| Rights | <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>. |
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