this is cool af and could completely revolutionise osteoarchaeology, especially if this protein analysis is applicable to children and elderly individuals which can be particularly hard to identify! here’s just a bit of context to demonstrate how amazing this is:
firstly: it’s important to remember that biological sex ≠ gender. Sex estimation may seem opposed to the study of gender as it only deals with binary sex. However, if sex estimation is compared to evidence of gender expression such as grave goods, primary or secondary records of the individual when they were alive, clothing etc. It can be very helpful in providing evidence for the existence of gender-nonconforming individuals who would otherwise be overlooked.
It’s really hard to be completely sure of an individual’s sex based on skeletal features alone for a whole load of reasons:
The most accurate way to estimate the sex of an individual is using the pelvis, the second best is using the skull (having both intact is rarer but always good). This requires the desired bones to be present, intact and able to be measured which doesn’t always happen and when it does they often contradict eachother! This new method would only require the presence of tooth enamel, and teeth tend to survive fairly well, or much better than the entire skull at least.
The way that our current skeletal sex estimation techniques were developed means that they are mildly biased towards identification of the skeletons of modern, western individuals from the fairly recent past. This means that populations from longer ago and different geographical locations are probably less accurate, but we don’t know by how much. Assuming that the tooth protein method was not developed with a similar bias, this could bypass this issue entirely!
Even if the individual is western and not from very long ago, individual genetic differences may still mean that an individual will not fit with the established sex estimation criteria that archaeologists/osteoarchaeologists look for. Again, assuming that the enamel protein is less affected by individual genetic differences, this problem could also be lessened
It is usually pretty much impossible to determine the sex of children/adolescents who have not gone through puberty, as the skeletal differences between males and females begin to appear as a result of the hormonal changes that occur during puberty. I don’t know much about the enamel on deciduous (milk/baby) teeth but, assuming this protein is present there, we could begin to estimate the sex of children and adolescents in so many osteological collections worldwide!
In women who have begun menopause, their bodies will be producing less oestrogen, and thus they will be (relatively speaking) producing more testosterone. Over time this begins to “reverse” the female features of the skeleton and makes some of them appear closer to male features - this can sometimes result in incorrect identification of older females as males. Similarly, if younger males have been castrated, they will produce much less testosterone and may not develop male skeletal characteristics as expected and therefore might be incorrectly identified as females. The new method would allow us to correct any errors made due to these reasons and just generally increase the accuracy of sex estimation.
(Disclaimer: This is just me rambling for fun at 1am about stuff I remember from the human osteology module I did during my degree. If you want an academic paper, go read one)
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