ANTH 001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Secondary Sex Characteristic, Sexual Differentiation, Weight-Bearing
9 Jun 2020
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Document Summary
Estimating sex in juveniles is inadvisable bc most sexual differences in the skeleton do not appear until the increase in sex hormones which stimulate the development of secondary sexual characteristics during puberty. Estimates of sex from the skeleton are therefore not considered reliable prior to around age 14. Another factor affecting the accuracy of subadult sex estimation is the limited avail- ability of juvenile skeletal material of known sex to study. Sexual differentiation has been noted to begin as early as the 10th fetal week and numerous studies have attempted to derive methods for estimating the sex of juveniles. It"s better to select skeletal samples that yield dna. It is possible for forensic anthropologists to differentiate between male and female skeletons because humans are sexually dimorphic, that is, they differ in size and shape. Sex differences in the skeleton are related primarily to the functions of parturition and locomotion.
