European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

ETHNICITY IDENTIFICATION THROUGH HAND DIMENSIONS: A STUDY IN NORTH INDIA

*Sangeeta Dey and Anup Kumar Kapoor

ABSTRACT

A vital important aspect in forensic anthropology is the identification of ethnicity of unknown individual or skeletal remains in addition to stature and sex. However, there is very limited number of study in the aspect of ethnicity identification. Objectives: The aim of this paper is to develop discriminant function formulae to determine ethnic groups from hand dimensions of North Indian Gujars and Jats. Materials and Methods: The individuals participated in the study belong to the northern part of India. The sample is composed of 161 Gujar males and 160 Gujar females and 155 Jat males and 152 Jat females. A total of 23 hand dimensions were utilized and discriminant function module of SPSS statistical software was used to analyse the data. Results and Discussion: Using 23 standard hand dimensions, average accuracies of 73% were obtained to discriminate the ethnic groups. This accuracy was about the same (72%) as obtained through multivariate function analysis when a ―leave-one-out classification‖ technique was applied to the samples. A posterior probability of 0.59 was found in as much as 92% of the sample. Stepwise discriminant function formulae were also derived for population specific standards and for the cases where fragmentary remains recovered for identification.

Keywords: Human identification, Ethnicity, Discriminant function analysis, Hand anthropometry, North Indian population groups.