1Anthropologist, Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology, Govt. Medical College Hospital, Sector 32, Chandigarh, 160030, India
2Additional Professor, Department of Forensic Medicine, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, 160012, India
*(Corresponding author) Jagmahender Singh Phone: +91-172-2665253 Extn. 1064 E-mail: jagmindera@hotmail.com
Determination of gender and estimation of age are the two most important attributes of biological identity of an individual. Both the morphological and morphometrical traits of human skeletal elements have been widely used in establishing such an identity of a person. In the present study, 343 pairs of adult human clavicle had been examined for the presence/absence and different sizes of rhomboid fossa in a postmortem sample of northwest India The male and female clavicles were found to have significantly different frequencies of rhomboid fossa but such a difference was not seen between right and left clavicles. Size and age-group specific differences were significant only for right clavicles as most of the subjects were right-handed. The 30+ years’ group subjects showed greater frequency of this fossa than the 17–30 years age-group but these differences were significant only for the left clavicles. So the shape and size of rhomboid fossa as well as its frequency cannot be used as a reliable indicator of age in the studied sample. The males had a greater tendency of having this fossa than the females; hence frequency of occurrence of rhomboid fossa can be used as reliable criteria for discrimination of gender and age of the study sample.
Identification, non-metric traits, clavicle, rhomboid fossa, forensic anthropology, gender and age estimation
