Bone measurement analysis indicates that the remains found on a remote island in the South Pacific were likely those of legendary American pilot Amelia Earhart, according to a UT researcher. Richard Jantz, professor emeritus of anthropology and director emeritus of UT’s Forensic Anthropology Center, re-examined seven bone measurements conducted in 1940 by physician D. W. Hoodless. Hoodless had concluded that the bones belonged to a man. Jantz, using several modern quantitative techniques—including Fordisc, a computer program for estimating sex, ancestry, and stature from skeletal measurements—found that Hoodless had incorrectly determined the sex of the remains. The program, co-created by Jantz, is used by nearly every board-certified forensic anthropologist in the US and around the world. The data revealed that the bones have more similarity to Earhart than to 99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample. The new study is published in the journal Forensic Anthropology. Jantz also compared the bone lengths with Earhart’s. Her humerus and radius lengths were obtained from a photograph with a scalable object. The scale was provided by Jeff Glickman of Photek. Her tibia length was estimated from measurements of her clothing in the George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers at Purdue University. A historic seamstress took the measurements, which included the inseam length and waist circumference of Earhart’s trousers. Based on this information, Jantz concludes that “until definitive evidence is presented that the remains are not those of Amelia Earhart, the most convincing argument is that they are hers.” Questioning Hoodless’s analysis had less to do with his competence and more to do with the state of forensic anthropology at the time, Jantz said. “Forensic anthropology was not well developed in the early 20th century,” the paper states. “There are many examples of erroneous assessments by anthropologists of the period. We can agree that Hoodless may have done as well as most analysts of the time could have done, but this does not mean his analysis was correct.” Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She mysteriously disappeared in 1937 while flying over the Pacific. Many assumed that her plane had crashed into the waters, and she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were never seen again. A group of researchers, including Jantz, believe she died as a castaway on the island of Nikumaroro. Along with bones found in 1940, a search party discovered part of a shoe judged to have been a woman’s, a sextant box designed to hold a Brandis Navy Surveying Sextant, manufactured around 1918 and similar to the one Earhart’s co-pilot used, and a Benedictine bottle, something Earhart was known to carry. The bones eventually disappeared, and what remained was metric data limited to four measurements of the skull and three of long bones—the tibia, humerus, and radius. In reaching his conclusion, Jantz investigated other theories about the bones. He looked at the possibility that they may have belonged to one of 11 men who were presumed killed at Nikumaroro in the 1929 wreck of the Norwich City on the island’s western reef, more than four miles from where the bones were found. He also considered the possibility that they were the bones of a Pacific Islander. He concluded that there was no documentation on the men and no evidence that any of them had survived the shipwreck to die as a castaway. The woman’s shoe and American sextant box also are not artifacts likely to have been associated with a survivor of the wreck. Nor was there evidence that a Pacific Islander had ended up as a castaway. Based on all the evidence, the paper states, Earhart “was known to have been in the area of Nikumaroro Island, she went missing, and human remains were discovered which are entirely consistent with her and inconsistent with most other people.” Jantz conducted the study in collaboration with the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). https://news.utk.edu/2018/03/07/res...nalysis-indicates-bones-were-amelia-earharts/
Amelia Earhart and the Nikumaroro Bones: A 1941 Analysis versus Modern Quantitative Techniques Richard L. Jantz Abstract The unknown fate of Amelia Earhart continues to fascinate. One of the most tantalizing clues involves skeletal remains found on Nikumaroro Island in 1940. Some have summarily dismissed these bones as the remains of Amelia Earhart because they were assessed as male by Dr. D. W. Hoodless, principal of the Central Medical School, Fiji, in 1940. The most recent such dismissal is that of Cross and Wright (2015), who argue that Hoodless’s methods were sound and therefore his sex estimate was likely correct. This paper addresses two issues: (1) it evaluates Hoodless’s methods and Cross and Wright’s support of them, and (2) it compares the Nikumaroro bones with what we can learn about Amelia Earhart’s bone lengths. When Hoodless conducted his analysis, forensic osteology was not yet a well-developed discipline. Evaluating his methods with reference to modern data and methods suggests that they were inadequate to his task; this is particularly the case with his sexing method. Therefore his sex assessment of the Nikumaroro bones cannot be assumed to be correct. To address the question of whether the Nikumaroro bones match estimates of Amelia Earhart’s bone lengths, I compare Earhart’s bone lengths with the Nikumaroro bones using Mahalanobis distance. This analysis reveals that Earhart is more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99% of individuals in a large reference sample. This strongly supports the conclusion that the Nikumaroro bones belonged to Amelia Earhart. Full Text: PDFHTML http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/525
So he calls himself a scientist, then posts this ridiculous claim with no evidence at all except he disagrees that the bones were from a stocky male. Total Snowflake.
"The unknown fate of Amelia Earhart continues to fascinate." False premise. Few people under the age of 30 have ever even heard of Amelia Earhart, and fewer people care about her death. Pretty clear she crashed and died, or crashed and died later. DB Cooper still perks curiosity, as it's pretty clear he escaped death in his escape.
As I'm doing a Master's thesis right now, one of the things the professors routinely touch on is that a) it's ok to say "more research is needed" and b) that it's ok to take up that research, potentially even showing that the previous hypothesis is wrong. (Or in academic-speak, "the evidence fails to support the hypothesis") I don't agree that no one under 30 knows about her (though if they don't, that's weird, as a trailblazing female pioneer seems like it has Common Core written all over it), but I do agree that it's a novelty, as either she crashed and died or crashed....then died. I don't think anyone thinks she made it back to civilization.
The bones were lost/destroyed in the 40s. The study looked at measurements of those bones that were done at the time.
