The use of permanent maxillary and mandibular canines in sex and age determination in a South African sample

Abstract

Dental anthropologists study the variation around the common shared patterns of teeth. These differences in the development, size and morphology of teeth are often used to help estimate the age and sex of unknown individuals. The aim of the study was two-fold. Firstly, it was determined whether sexually dimorphic characteristics exist in the size of permanent canines of South Africans, and whether these differences are of sufficient magnitude to make them usable as a method to determine sex from unknown remains. For this purpose the mesiodistal and buccolingual crown diameters and the maxillary/mandibular canine index were used. Secondly, the Lamendin technique of age estimation was tested and adapted to a South African sample. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the usability of human permanent canines in the determination of two demographic characteristics, namely sex and age, in a South African sample. A sample of known sex, age and population group was obtained from the Pretoria Bone Collection (University of Pretoria, South Africa) and the Raymond A. Dart Collection (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa). The canines of 498 skulls were measured from four groups namely, black males, black females, white males and white females. The age of the sample ranged from 20 to 90 years. Using discriminant function analysis, it was possible to differentiate between the sexes with a relatively good accuracy of up to 87%. It was also evident that the two populations differed from one another as far as tooth size is concerned. Lamendin’s method of age estimation yielded poor precision and accuracy. Periodontosis was better correlated with age than root transparency, where the highest R2 value was 0.35. In summary it seems that the dimensions of the canine are useful in estimation of sex, should the population group be known. The Lamendin technique, however, gave relatively poor results even though new population specific formulae were created for the black and white populations of this sample. It could only estimate the age of the sample with an R2 value of 0.41 and mean errors ranging from 12.02 to 15.76 years.