Аннотация:The estimation of age of infant skeletons is usually based on the dental
development and, to a lesser extent, on the postcranial metrics. The former is
considered more reliable due to its stronger genetic determination and lesser
susceptibility to the influence of environmental factors. But numerous studies
show that dental development also displays a high level of inter-individual
variability. Thus, the age of infants and small children is usually estimated in the
quite broad range.
A possibility to increase the precision of age estimation in infants might be
the use of cranial metrics. The first year of life is the time of most rapid growth in
all craniofacial dimensions which abruptly slows down during the second year of
life. Noteworthy, growth trajectories of many measurements differ from each
other substantially and are not linear. It means that based on the combination of
the levels of maturation of different craniofacial dimensions in a particular infant
skull it might be possible to give a quite narrow estimation of his age.
In this study, a large sample of high resolution clinical CT scans is used to
calculate discriminant functions allowing for a precise estimation of infant age
using craniofacial measurements. The sample includes 146 CT datasets of boys of
the 2nd to 6th years of life and 101 dataset of infants (boys) of the 1st
year of life.
The linear measurements employed describe the main morphological features of
the facial skeleton and are commonly used in craniological studies. Most of them
can be easily measured even on fragmentary specimens.
The functions were then tested on forensic samples with the documented
age-at-death of individuals. The results of these tests have shown that, despite
methodological and inter-population differences, the functions can be successfully
applied for the estimation of age of infant skeletal individual