Estimating sex using discriminant analysis of mandibular measurements from a modern Greek sample

Background: Sex determination is an integral and fundamental step in biological profile construction. The mandible, which holds many dimorphic traits, can be useful for sex estimation in the forensic context. However, reliable sex estimation usually relies on population-specific mandibular morphometric criteria. To date, no such criteria are available for the modern Greek population, and the present study aims to fill this lack of data by identifying the most sexually dimorphic mandibular traits on a modern Greek population sample and reporting the discriminant functions that can most effectively be used for estimating sex. Materials and methods: For the purposes of this research, the 3D models of 194 adult mandibles (105 males and 89 females) from the Athens skeletal reference collection were used. A battery of 20 linear and 3 angular measurements was calculated from the 3D coordinates of anatomical landmarks positioned on the respective models and was analyzed by means of ANOVA and discriminant function analysis to investigate the expression of sexual dimorphism. Results: The coronoid height, the ramus height, and the maximum mandibular length are the most sexually dimorphic metric traits of the mandible, while the produced sex discriminant functions yielded cross-validated classification accuracy up to 85.7% for the Greek sample. Furthermore, most of the examined combinations of measurements exhibited the same sex discriminant capacity between different reference samples, despite their respective discriminant functions being population specific. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that the produced sex discriminant functions can be effectively used for sex determination in forensic casework and to verify the population specificity of these functions but also suggest that the expression of sexual dimorphism in the mandible shares certain features across different populations.