Forget all of those expensive DNA tests that claim to reveal your ancestry because a new proof-of-concept study by researchers at North Carolina State University and Washington State University demonstrates how a person’s background can be identified using his/her fingerprints.
As part of the study, which was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, lead author Nichole Fournier, a former graduate student at NC State who is now as WSU, and her colleagues conducted a very detailed fingerprint analysis, going beyond the Level 1 details typically studied by anthropologists and examining Level 2 details as well.
Level 1 details, the authors explained, include such things as pattern types and ridge counts. Level 2 details include more specific variations, including bifurcations– where a fingerprint ridge splits. These minutiae, they said, are often used in forensic fingerprint analysis, but in this case were used to hunt for patterns specific to sex or ancestral background.
While Fournier’s team found no significant differences in the fingerprints of men and women, they did discover significant differences between people of European American ancestry and those of African American descent in the Level 2 details of those individuals’ fingerprints.
Discovery beneficial to anthropologists, forensic scientists
The research involved analysis of the right index-finger fingerprints of 243 men and women (61 African American men and 61 African Americans women, plus 60 European American men and 61 European American women). It revealed minutiae variation among ancestral groups that the authors believe will be beneficial to both forensic research and anthropology.
“This is the first study to look at this issue at this level of detail, and the findings are extremely promising,” said Ann Ross, a professor of anthropology at North Carolina State University and senior author the September 23 paper. “But more work needs to be done. We need to look at a much larger sample size and evaluate individuals from more diverse ancestral backgrounds.”
While Ross cautions that “a lot of additional work needs to be done,” she believes that this discovery “holds promise for helping law enforcement.” She added that the research found “a level of variation in fingerprints that is of interest to anthropologists, particularly in the area of global population structures – we just need to start looking at the Level 2 fingerprint details.”
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