Abstract
The need for accurate sex estimation from the human skeleton has been long desired in the scientific and medico legal communities alike. The current paradigm of the field is that visual sex estimation of the cranium provides fairly high accuracy. However, such techniques are highly subjective as they are based on the qualitative value judgments of the observer. Two-dimensional metric techniques utilizing mathematically derived indices and discriminant functions, created in an effort to reduce the subjectivity of visual sex estimation lead to the loss of the three-dimensional structure of the cranium, by reducing it to a series of two-dimensional measurements. The introduction of computerized, three-dimensional data recording methods and analysis have brought about a means of preserving the three-dimensional structure of the skull, increasing the amount of potential information that can be discovered from the data recorded. EDMA is one such three-dimensional data analysis method that has been used successfully in multiple studies of human and nonhuman primates, however only limited attention as been given to sex and age determination of humans.