In a letter addressed to the forensic anthropology community, two university anthropologists call for an immediate moratorium on the use of morphoscopic cranial traits in the estimation of ancestry, claiming the traits are not grounded in science and only serve to promote the debunked biological race concept. Further, the authors argue that including ancestry estimates in forensic anthropology reports could hinder identification efforts on law enforcement’s part if the victim is found to have a minority ancestry or anything other than European-descended.
“The idea that morphoscopic traits can adequately be used to place decedents into discrete groups has been perpetuated in the pages of this journal without any deliberate appraisal of the underlying assumption that a finite number of groups exist; or critically, acknowledgement of the harm of connecting social race to skeletal traits insofar that it only serves to sustain the falsified biological race concept and misinforms the public, to include law enforcement and the medicolegal community, about human variation,” write Jonathan Bethard, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, and Elizabeth DiGangi, an anthropology professor at Binghamton University. The letter to the editor was published recently published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
Anthropologists have been using morphoscopic traits to estimate the likely ancestry of unidentified human remains for decades, even centuries. Traditionally, this has been accomplished through visual inspection of certain morphological nonmetric variants of the skull, primarily the facial region and in particular the nasal aperture elements and surrounding structures. Just as the length of the femur can give clues as to a person’s age at time of death, facial and cranial measurements can estimate likely ancestry, sometimes giving law enforcement a lead they didn’t have before—or at least a starting point.
If the results are taken to court, the method of estimation used by anthropologists must adhere to Daubert guidelines, which is why anthropologists research and publish macromorphoscopic reference datasets, validation studies and overall standards for the examination of morphoscopic traits. Additionally, various statistical frameworks, parametric and nonparametric, have been employed to calculate error rates and provide probabilistic statements of the strength of these estimations.
However, Bethard and DiGangi say the skeletal nonmetric traits that are studied by biological anthropologists are not the morphoscopic traits utilized by forensic anthropologists for ancestry estimates. The anthropologists say the heritability of morphoscopic traits is unknown since “we do not understand important details such as how and why a person inherited the traits from their ancestors.”
Further, the authors believe the failure to explore this heritability is a cause-and-effect of systemic race hierarchies present in the worldview of the past and present, as evidenced by 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement. In the letter, they openly ponder if investigative efforts are adequate for unidentified human remains that are not of European descent. Based on this, the authors describe what they believe to be a paradox: racial bias on the part of investigators possibly hindering identification efforts when a major goal of forensic anthropology is the positive identification of unknown remains.
Bethard and DiGangi say that paradox has never been investigated, so they call on the community to research if and how positive identification rates are impacted by the inclusion of an ancestry estimate in a forensic anthropology report. Until it can be proven that ancestry estimates do not lessen the chance for identification, the anthropologists call for the elimination of these estimates in all reports.
“Part of contemporary forensic anthropological practice is a throwback to an earlier time when ideas about biological determinism and essentialist aspects of the races were taken as gospel truths and used to justify racialized hierarchies leading to both overt and covert structural inequities which continue today,” write Bethard and DiGangi. “If we do not have these conversations now, will we ever?”