ANT 326 and ANTL 326:  Human Osteology                                                                   with Dr. Albert

Final Exam Review Guidelines
 

• The final exam is designed to be a 50 minute test with three sections:  

Part I:  multiple choice (23 questions, 2 points each—46 points total)

           Part II: matching (15 questions, 2 points each—30 points total)

           Part III: short answer (6 questions, varying points—24 points total)

           and a bonus question worth up to 4 points.

• Study your notes, review the chapters in your texts, and review your labs.

• Be sure to review bones, features, landmarks, siding; or in the case of the vertebrae, be sure to recall how to tell the difference between cervical, thoracic, and lumbar, etc.  This is a significant portion of the exam.  Multiple choice questions and the matching will require you to identify which bones have certain features.

2 sample questions  (answers:  scroll to the bottom):  

1.  Which of the following bone has a sciatic notch?

1. radius

2. cranium

3. innominate

4. tibia

5. first metacarpal

2. Which of the following features is found on the mandible?
   
   

   1. mental foramen

   2. infraorbital foramen

   3. foramen magnum

   4. supraorbital foramen

   5. mandibular foramen

Some questions will combine basic osteology with methods of analysis.  An example is: 

3.  Which of the following best indicates a teenage female?

a.  fused ectocranial sutures and sharper superior orbital margins
b.  an unfused iliac crest epiphysis and a narrow sciatic notch
c.  long bone epiphyses in the process of uniting, wide epicondylar and bicondylar breadths
d.  unerupted third molars and a gracile mandible
e.  billowy ridged pubic symphysis and a wide subpubic angle
              

 

• Recall theoretical considerations of age, sex, ancestry, and stature estimation methods, not only what methods you can use, but when it’s appropriate to use certain methods, under what conditions might certain methods be more accurate or reliable than others.  Most methods we learned in class rely on anthroposcopic analysis, yet recall that some methods are quantitative (i.e., what are discriminant function analyses used for?).

  •  Be able to answer questions given certain scenarios.  For example, if one innominate and two humeri were discovered, how would you determine age, sex, ancestry, and stature? 

  • What is the MNI (minimum number of individuals)? 

  • Hints and suggestions for how to answer these questions are below; please scroll down.

• Paleodemography:  What are some examples of vital statistics and what do they mean? 

• Pathology and paleopathology:  Be able to describe the skeletal appearance of some diseases or conditions that affect bone.

• How would you determine if a bone is human or nonhuman?

• Review your notes, texts, and labs.

Answers to multiple choice sample questions:
1. c
2. a
3. e (if you chose d, remember that wisdom teeth do not always emerge/erupt--they can stay in the alveolar bone)

Answers to scenario question and MNI:

1 innominate: 

• age:  are all 3 bones (ilium, ischium, pubis) fused at the acetabulum?  Is the iliac crest epiphysis fused?  If the answer is yes, then look at the pubic symphysis morphology for age.  What would a young, middle, or elderly adult pubic symphysis look like?

• sex:  if the bone is adult you can determine sex more easily--look at the sciatic notch width, subpubic angle, ischiopubic ramus width, presence or absence of a ventral arc, pits of paturition.

• ancestry:  can ancestry be determined?

• stature:  can stature be determined?

2 humeri:

• age:  is the humeral head epiphysis united?  Are the distal epiphyses united?  Which would you expect to be united before the other--the shoulder or the elbow?  If epiphyseal union is complete, what other methods would you use to determine age?  What would osteoarthritis look like and what would it tell you--age only?  How might bone density be determined and could this reveal something about age?

• sex:  humeral head diameter, epicondylar width, robusticity?

• ancestry:  can ancestry be determined?

• stature:  how would you calculate stature?  What if the bones were fragmentary?

MNI: 

• First determine if there are any duplicate bones--two right humeri, two left humeri. 

• If so, then you have two people.

• If not, determine the sex--you could have one female and one male humerus where one is a left and one is a right so this would still be at least two people instead of one person. 

• Next, look at the sex of the innominate. 

• If all bones are the same sex and the two humeri are not both the same side and they appear similar in architecture, then the MNI is one person.

• Architecture refers to the size or shape of bones--do the bones look like they go together?  Do they look like they're from different people? 

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