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Male or Female? AI enables sex determination of sheep based on their talus bone

SNSB researchers present an AI-based method to determine the sex of sheep with high accuracy, using only linear measurements of their talus bones. The team of archaeozoologists and computer scientists recently presented and published their results at the 20th IEEE International Conference on e-Science in Osaka, Japan.

The new study could make it much easier for researchers to determine the sex of archaeological animal finds in the future: with the help of AI-based algorithms, the sex of sheep can be determined quickly and easily—and only on the basis of four different measurements of their ankle bone, scientifically called the talus (plural tali).

The advantage of the application, especially for archaeological finds, is obvious: the ankle bones of sheep or cattle are relatively small and compact and are therefore usually well and completely preserved in archaeological sites. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) and the LMU München tested various machine-learning algorithms for their study.

"The accuracy rate of the AI algorithms is high," says Nadine Schüler, first author of the study and scientist at the State Collection for Paleonanatomy Munich (SNSB-SPM) and LMU München. "Most algorithms determine the sex correctly—up to 70%, some variants even manage up to 90%."

Talus bones of a modern cattle, a small Celtic cattle and an aurochs from the early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe (SE Turkey) (from left to right). Credit: SNSB-SPM