| Few previous studies have demonstrated the likelihood of using the worldwide patterns of dental morphological variation in prediction of ancestry in the context of forensic dental anthropology. This paper introduces a new quantitative method for predicting forensic racial identity of individual specimens based on dental morphological trait analysis. In this study, the inter-population variation in the expression frequency of 16 non-metric tooth crown traits, manifested on the permanent dentition, was used for analysis. The method was developed from the notion that dental morphological characteristics, when viewed as sets of traits rather than isolated variables, can be utilized to calculate the relative probability that an individual belongs to a... |
