Forensic anthropologist Richard Jantz is about finished with his re-evaluation of the castaway bone measurements in response to Australian archaeologist Richard Wright’s 2015 challenge to TIGHAR’s 1998 paper “
Amelia Earhart’s Bones and Shoes?”. It has been over two years since he agreed to take on this project. As with Jeff Glickman, he works along on pro bono work for TIGHAR as time permits. He'll probably be another few weeks before having his paper finished.
In addition to applying the latest databases for determining gender and ethnicity from bone measurements, Dr. Jantz has been working with me and Jeff Glickman to answer some key questions about AE’s physiology for comparison to the measurements taken by Dr. Hoodless in 1941.
In the 1998 paper Jantz and Burns judged that the castaway was between 5’6’ and 5’ 7” in height. Jantz wanted to know, how tall was Amelia really? You may recall that Jeff was able to establish her height forensically as 5’7”, not the 5’8” she put on her pilot’s license.
A couple months ago, Dr. Jantz noticed something unusual about the Niku arm bones:
"The Nikumaroro bones have a relatively long radius compared to the humerus, a ratio of 0.756, compared to about 0.73 for women born about the same time as AE. That is well within the range of variation, but over 1 standard deviation above the mean. In one of the few photos I could find that show her with bare arms, I approximated the location of her humerus and radius, and the ratio in pixels 0.747, which is decent agreement, but I’d be more comfortable is Jeff did the comparison.”
Jeff selected a different photo to work from and undertook a forensic study. This morning I received Jeff’s full report (attached) and forwarded it to Richard Jantz. Jeff's conclusion:
“Given the evidence and my experience in the field of photogrammetry and photointerpretation, I estimate that the radius-to-humerus ratio of Amelia Earhart in Figure 5 is 0.76.”
The results are even better than Jantz suspected. Simply put, the castaway and Amelia Earhart had the exact same unusually long forearms. It ain’t a DNA match, but it ain’t bad.