Forensic anthropologists are experts in human skeletal anatomy, growth, and development expertise that we use in medicolegal death investigations for the recovery and analysis of human skeletal remains. These findings illustrate the benefit and necessity of embracing studies that employ population structure models to better understand human variation and the historical factors that have influenced it.įorensic anthropology is a sub-discipline of biological anthropology, the science of studying what it means to be human via our biology. Our results indicate groups are not patterned by the ancestry trifecta. Further, we employ modern geometric morphometric and spatial analysis methods on craniofacial coordinate anatomical landmarks from several Latin American samples to test the validity of applying the antiquated tri-continental approach to ancestry (i.e., African, Asian, European). Here, we use content analysis of the Journal of Forensic Sciences for the period 2009–2019 to demonstrate the use of various nomenclature and resultant confusion in ancestry estimation studies, and as a mechanism to discuss how forensic anthropologists have eschewed a human variation approach to studying human morphological differences in favor of a simplistic and debunked typological one. However, many forensic anthropologists contend, in part, that because social race categories used by law enforcement can be predicted by cranial variation, ancestry remains a necessary parameter for estimation. Its use is controversial because the biological race concept was debunked by scientists decades ago. One of the parameters forensic anthropologists have traditionally estimated is ancestry, which is used in the United States as a proxy for social race.