Assessing the accuracy of body mass estimation equations from pelvic and femoral variables among modern British women of known mass Mariel Young a, * , Fjola Johannesdottir b , Ken Poole b , Colin Shaw c , J.T. Stock c a Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University,11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA b Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom c PAVE Research Group, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom article info Article history: Received 31 May 2016 Accepted 16 October 2017 Available online 21 November 2017 Keywords: Osteology Pelvic variation Femoral head diameter Pubis length Neandertal body mass Paleoanthropology abstract Femoral head diameter is commonly used to estimate body mass from the skeleton. The three most frequently employed methods, designed by Ruff, Grine, and McHenry, were developed using different populations to address different research questions. They were not specifically designed for application to female remains, and their accuracy for this purpose has rarely been assessed or compared in living populations. This study analyzes the accuracy of these methods using a sample of modern British women through the use of pelvic CT scans (n ¼ 97) and corresponding information about the individuals' known height and weight. Results showed that all methods provided reasonably accurate body mass estimates (average percent prediction errors under 20%) for the normal weight and overweight subsamples, but were inaccurate for the obese and underweight subsamples (average percent prediction errors over 20%). When women of all body mass categories were combined, the methods provided reasonable estimates (average percent prediction errors between 16 and 18%). The results demonstrate that different methods provide more accurate results within specific body mass index (BMI) ranges. The McHenry Equation provided the most accurate estimation for women of small body size, while the original Ruff Equation is most likely to be accurate if the individual was obese or severely obese. The refined Ruff Equation was the most accurate predictor of body mass on average for the entire sample, indicating that it should be utilized when there is no knowledge of the individual's body size or if the individual is assumed to be of a normal body size. The study also revealed a correlation between pubis length and body mass, and an equation for body mass estimation using pubis length was accurate in a dummy sample, suggesting that pubis length can also be used to acquire reliable body mass estimates. This has implications for how we interpret body mass in fossil hominins and has particular relevance to the interpretation of the long pubic ramus that is characteristic of Neandertals. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The ability to accurately estimate human body mass from skeletal remains is an important task for paleoanthropologists, archeologists, and forensic scientists (Auerbach and Ruff, 2004). Knowledge about an organism's body size gives significant insight into its ecological, behavioral, and life history traits (Calder, 1984; Schmidt-Nielsen, 1984; Damuth and MacFadden, 1990; Smith et al., 1996). Accurately estimating body mass also has implications for the study of human evolution due to the fact that size estimates are used to extrapolate other information about an organism's anatomy and life history. Because body size and allometric re- lationships have an important bearing on many aspects of an or- ganism's existence, paleoanthropologists often infer characteristics of fossil hominins such as their relative lifespan, social structure, and diet (Wood and Collard, 1999; Ruff, 2002; Sciulli and Blatt, 2008; Kurki et al., 2010; Reynolds and Gallagher, 2012) on the ba- sis of body mass estimates. Estimates of body mass are also bene- ficial when comparing intra and inter-specific features of hominins such as relative limb size, tooth size, and cranial capacity (Smith and Jungers, 1997; Rightmire, 2004; DeSilva and Lesnik, 2008). However, body mass estimates for Homo have varied greatly, with as much as 50% difference in size estimation for the same individual (McHenry, 1976, 1992; Feldesman and Lundy, 1988; Rightmire, * Corresponding author. E-mail address: marielwilliams@g.harvard.edu (M. Young). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Human Evolution journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhevol https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2017.10.011 0047-2484/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Human Evolution 115 (2018) 130e139