Abstract

It is vital concern for forensic medicine, forensic pathology and anthropology experts to estimate the complete stature, especially when fragmentary remains of victims of mass disasters are brought for postmortem. Complete stature reconstruction from available fragments depends upon the facts that each part exhibit consistent ratios when compared with complete height of an individual. Present study is devoted to find out ratio between hand-length and body height in Kashmir region of India. Results of the study reveal highly significant gender differences between the selected parameters necessitating the need for separate data for two sexes. The results of present study reveal that the mean values for males height is 1894.07±65.93 and for females is 1703.70±51.71 and mean right and left hand lengths for males are 181.79±8.92 and 183.63±9.15 respectively and mean right and left hand-lengths for females are 170.84±9.57 and 170.70±12.00 on statistical analysis these figures shows highly significant differences between left and right as well as in males and females ≤0.001 and the mean values for right and left hand-length/body height ratio were 0.10±0.01 and 0.11±0.01 except for females having equal right and left hand-length/body height ratios i.e 0.11±0.01. The values were found out to be positively significant with correlation coefficient of 0.535 and 0.702 for present population. Mean values thus obtain for both sexes of Jammu and Kashmir, part of north India can be used practically in anatomy, forensic and archeological investigation.