Accuracy and reliability of Southern European standards for the tibia: a test of two Mediterranean populations

Sexual dimorphic variation between populations must be taken into consideration when applying existing methods on unrelated samples. Validation studies are extremely important to avoid misclassification and ensure high quality standards.

This paper presents a test of a Southern European metric method on Greek-Cypriots (N=132) and Turkish (N=203). Three tibia measurements were taken, sex differences were explored using a Wilcoxon test and the parameters were applied to the original discriminant functions.

The results showed accuracy rates ranging from 79 to 86% for Greek-Cypriots and from 80 to 88% for Turkish. Differences in the performance of the formulae applied were observed between the samples. Correct classification rates are very similar to the ones reported by the original method.

This study demonstrates that the application of the Southern European method to estimate sex on these two Mediterranean populations is reliable. A larger and more diverse sample is required to verify our results.