@phdthesis{Manthey2023,
  author    = {Manthey, Laura},
  title     = {The Shape of the Frontal Bone},
  doi       = {10.25972/OPUS-29898},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-298986},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {The aim of this study was to provide a comprehensive overview of the frontal bone in the forensic context with special emphasis on its shape. Analyses on 19th and 20th century Euro-American and German crania were performed in terms of population differences, sexual dimorphism, secular change, and metopism. It could clearly be seen that the frontal bone on its own already provides a lot of information toward the biological profile of an individual. Overall, using size and shape combined for analyses would always produce the best results, followed by shape only and then size only. Nevertheless, Log_Centroid_Size was the best sex-discriminating variable in the size-shape combined analyses for both populations. Population differences as well as sexual dimorphism could both be assessed (with varying accuracy) using size only and shape only respectively. Very little secular change between the 19th and 20th century was found for the frontal in both groups respectively, with the secular change that could be seen mostly being shape variation. Metopism analysis was only performed on German crania, because the presence or absence of a metopic suture was not documented for the Euro-American crania. Unfortunately, the results of these analyses were very limited due to too small sample sizes for the overall low percentage of metopism. The metopic frontal was once again found to be short in relation to its width and presenting a more rounded frontal curvature. The attempt of creating a formula to morphometrically assess the presence of metopism was not successful. The results of this thesis suggest that forensic case work on skeletal remains would greatly benefit from a broader application of Geometric Morphometrics and consequently from larger databases containing shape data as well as more advanced and user-friendly software for this type of analyses.},
  language  = {en}
}