Morphometric Analysis of the Neurocranium in an Adult South African Cadaveric Sample,

Craniometric studies of South Africans yield high accuracies of sex and ancestry classification, but most assess only inter‐group variation of Black and White individuals, excluding the highly heterogeneous Colored group, which constitute a significant proportion of the population. This study applied a geometric morphometric approach to the neurocrania of 774 Black, Colored, and White individuals to assess sex and ancestry estimation accuracy based on the detected morphological variation. Accuracies of 70% and 83% were achieved for sex and ancestry, respectively, with ancestry‐related variation contributing the largest proportion of overall observed variation. Even when comparing the closely related Black and Colored groups, relatively high accuracies were obtained. It is thus recommended that a similar approach be used to develop a contemporary three‐dimensional database, which can be used to objectively, reliably, and accurately classify unknown remains in the South African forensic context.