Pedagogical access and ethical considerations in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology.

Traditional education in biological anthropology relies primarily on hands-on, highly visual experiences. Forensic anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, and osteologists in general should aim to collaborate in developing widespread digital pedagogy suitable for our discipline, increasing digital technologies used for education and training. Considerations and suggested pathways toward a biological anthropology digital pedagogy include accommodating for varying levels of digital fluency, understanding global perspectives and cultural beliefs, equity in accessibility, ethical strategies, prioritization levels of content that should be made publicly available, appropriate platforms and forms of media for disseminating different types of content, and the necessity of multiple modalities.

Ancestry Estimation Using Cranial and Postcranial Macromorphoscopic Traits.

Ancestry estimation methods using macromorphoscopic (MMS) traits commonly focus exclusively on cranial morphology. The objective of this study was to demonstrate the value of postcranial MMS traits, highlighting a combined cranial/postcranial trait approach to ancestry estimation using quadratic discriminant function and a variety of machine learning classification models including artificial neural networks (aNN), random forest models, and support vector machine. Eight cranial and eleven postcranial MMS traits were collected from the Terry and Bass Skeletal Collections (American Black = 81; American White = 173).