Undergraduate Essay Award | Anthropology | SIU

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Undergraduate Essay Award

Each year, an award and cash prize are given to an undergraduate for the best research essay submitted to an Anthropology competition, generally early in Spring semester. Preference is given to students who are Anthropology majors.


2022 Winner: Jeffery Smith

The Direction of Ancestry Estimations in Forensic Anthropology

Ancestry estimations have undergone many changes in the past thirty years. With changes in terminology from race to ancestry and the adoption of more modern databases and software for these estimations, forensic anthropologists can assess ancestry more accurately than ever before. More recently, however, some forensic anthropologists have been questioning the methods surrounding ancestry estimation and whether these kinds of estimates should be used in the investigative process. Moreover, some forensic anthropologists are questioning if we should even be doing these estimations at all. Is there anything to gain from these estimations during an investigation? With such criticism and the critiques surrounding the accuracies of ancestry estimation, what are the future implications for this metric of the biological profile within forensic anthropology? Some anthropologists propose a reform in ancestry estimation. This reform includes another change in specific terminologies, but there also needs to be a change in how we represent and categorize population samples that account for a combination of genetic and social flux over time.