Police will want to know whether it is likely that the person was white, black, of Asian origin or any other classification that the human uses to separate its species into different groups.  In the past, we would have talked about ‘race’ but this is a relic from the times of the Victorian anthropologists and paleontologists who wanted to group individuals into categories looking at variations between humans and to try to understand human evolution.

Today,  Forensic Anthropologists use computer programmes into which they enter measurements taken from the skull and it will provide a probability of the most likely ancestral origin of the individual.  This is not always reliable and, in the modern world, there is such a cosmopolitan mix of humans that determination of grouping can be challenging.

This is the biological characteristic that is most challenging for the FA to achieve with any degree of reliability.