Biological a nity studies or geographic population analyses have long been a focus of anthropology. Archaeologists tend to approach this topic in terms of descriptions of prehistoric peoples and their migrations across the landscape through the analysis of the material culture left behind. Linguists may examine population studies through changes in word meaning, pronunciation, and language constructs. Physical anthropologists and forensic anthropologists explore populations in terms of identity, or biological groupings (frequently in terms of ethnicities or populations). For physical anthropologists, determining the biological a nity of a group or simply classifying a single individual to a population is a demanded skill—both from colleagues in anthropology and professionals in the medicolegal community.

A major goal of this study is to provide an “on the ground anthropologist” a suite of procedures by which to estimate biological a nity and determine sex of an unknown individual through the use of a relatively robust bone, the mandible. e study tests the idea that mandibular metrics and morphology can be used to determine population a nity (and as a by-product, sex) of an unknown specimen accurately. Straightforward and easily understood processes (eg, simple morphometric and morphoscopic scoring methods), without the need for relatively complex statistical manipulations, are presented. e study attempts to take a rather far-flung approach, incorporating worldwide populations, rather than just two or three groups. Further, if both morphometric and morphoscopic features are employed at the same time, smaller and smaller portions of the bone are all that may be needed to determine the biological pro le of an individual via custom discriminant functions. All of the data presented here may be requested from the author, to be incorporated into databases such as FORDISC 3.0 (Jantz and Ousley 2005), so that the practitioner can develop customized functions for use in his or her particular work. e bulk of this study is drawn from Berg (2008). Additional relevant background information, discussion, ndings, summary statistics, and functions can be found therein. A condensed version of the description of the population samples, variables examined, and statistical justi cations is provided here for the reader for ease of reference.