Skeletal Kinship Analysis Using Developmental Anomalies of the Foot

Abstract

Developmental anomalies of the skeleton are often treated as mere curiosities, but in some contexts, they may prove useful to bioarchaeologists for answering questions about the past. One such use can be found in skeletal kinship analysis, where discrete traits can help to identify close genetic relatives in archaeological cemeteries. Previous research suggests that discrete traits used for skeletal kinship analysis should have several characteristics—they must obviously be heritable, but in addition, they should be easy to score as present or absent, their frequencies should not vary by age or sex, and they should be low frequency traits. Low frequency traits are less likely than higher frequency traits to be found in two individuals merely by chance. In this study, we consider 17 developmental anomalies of the human foot as candidates for use in skeletal kinship analysis. The traits are evaluated in terms of the characteristics described above, after which kinship analyses are attempted on two different populations. Ten of the anomalies are found to be good candidates for skeletal kinship analysis, including accessory navicular, four different forms of brachydactyly, three types of tarsal coalition, and two forms of the os intermetatarseum. When frequencies of these traits were examined and compared to a reference sample in three cemeteries, however, only a single group of six possible genetic relatives were identified. The results suggest that skeletal kinship analysis using individual heritable traits is perhaps best applied to small cemeteries or burial clusters rather than larger cemeteries containing many different lineages. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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