Originally posted on Feb 25, 2024 on our Patreon.
When an anthropologist unearths an ancient burial, they’re easily able to discern the sex of the deceased, right? We’ve all seen the gaudy skeleton graphs where the females have large birthing hips, and the males have large shoulders and chiseled chins. The truth, as always, is a bit more complicated than that.
The majority of human skeletons are somewhere between the axis of certainty. As anthropologists, we are forewarned that we cannot “declare” sex, we can estimate it. Several bones can be used for this process, including the skull (mandibular arch, chin, jaw bone), and the hip (sciatic arch, sacrum, pelvis, subpubic angle). For an anthropologist at work, each of these would be graded individually, on this scale:
- 0= Missing, broken, or damaged
- 1= Certainly female
- 2= Appears female
- 3= Androgynous
- 4= Appears male
- 5= Certainly male
Many male skeletons can have “female” features like a softer defined face or larger hips, and many female skeletons can have masculine features.
The result of this exercise would be added up to produce a best-as possible estimation for sex. But even for established anthropologists, this is not always correct. For one example, a skull thought to be believed to belong to Emelia Erhardt was found to be male, upon later analysis. On another, people who have intersex or hormonal disorders are likely to be misread. For example, many eunuch skeletons are believed to be female initially.
There are only a few certain ways to know the sex of an individual. One is using chromosomal testing, which has a low but still-possible margin of error. The other is if the pelvis shows signs of post-partum pining, which only occurs in individuals who have given birth. Having multiple bones from one individual with a strong score on each is a good indicator. Aside from that, however, there is little to definitively tell.
Some individuals, such as children, cannot be sexed most ways at all. This is because the human skeleton is the same from birth until puberty regardless of what someone’s chromosomal anatomy is. It’s on this onset that hormones begin to shape the skeleton into the forms that we know today as male and female. It’s worthwhile to remember that bones are living tissues, growing and changing in your body across life.