How does science know the gender of a skull?

Already a bone, no one is like anyone, how do you know it?

Why do archaeologists always have to determine the age of the mummy? Because these ruins are the only bridge that brings us back in time to thousands of years ago. Determining the exact age of mummies is an important factor in the discovery of human history.

Often archaeologists can determine the sex of a mummy through the skeleton structure, but what if what remains is just a skull? Things are not that simple now.

Teeth will help determine the sex of the skull.

Methods of examination of the remains

The gender of a corpse is usually determined through different sex structures , such as the pelvis. However, this difference is not so obvious in children because the skeleton is not fully developed, so sex determination is also more difficult.

To overcome this, researchers will have to rely on DNA, but this method is extremely expensive and difficult to implement, requiring research in a sterile environment.

And now comes the question: what if the remains only have a skull? Is there a way that is both less expensive and able to test accurately? Recently a group of scientists have discovered a factor that can help determine the sex of a human skull. And that is teeth .

The study was published in the Archaeological Science Journal by the University of California, Davis using Mass spectrometry (MS) to analyze proteins in teeth.

They studied the genes of amelogenin (a group of proteins that play an important role in tooth enamel formation). Women will have the amelogenin-X gene, while men have both amelogenin-X and Y.

Women will have the amelogenin-X gene, while men have both amelogenin-X and Y.

The researchers studied 40 samples of the enamel of 25 remains, including adults and children, dating from 100 to 7,300 years on archaeological sites in North America and Peru, along with a number of teeth. modern. Of all the samples they found, half had only amelogenin-X, while the other half had amelogenin-Y, indicating that their owners were male.

The problem is that if a sample has too little amelogenin-Y, it will be difficult to detect or even find the trace of this protein, which could lead to misclassification of the result (false negative). To overcome this, the team used a statistical method to see if the results were misclassified based on the number of amelogenin-X present.

Jelmer Eerkens from the University of California Davis, co-author of the study, said: "Dental models / models can tell us about the diet from its owner, and the bacteria in the mouth. ",

According to him, we can date the corpses through Radiocarbon dating.

The research team said that measuring amelogenin in teeth could be used in combination with current methods to bring higher accuracy, and it also showed the importance of teeth for archaeologists. learn in the discovery of human history.