Originally Posted by abaya

Well, they wouldn't know, if they were looking at my skeletal remains, or ktspktsp's, or our children... or a whole lot of other folks who don't "fit" the mold set by the three primary "races."

Forensic anthropology can compare bones to the "most average" sample of someone from one "race" (= people who lived in one geographic area for a long time and therefore bred amongst themselves, replicating their genes over and over again to create a dominant variety of biological characteristics, which is usually called "clinal variation" rather than race, in bio anthro), but if someone doesn't look anything like any of the three primary "races," then the forensics people are screwed, at least down that line of inquiry. They have to use other evidence to try and deduct who that person was.

It's important to not conflate genotype with phenotype, here. Human phenotype variation, including bone structure, does not equal "race." Race is what humans create to label different phenotypes, which result from clinal distribution... not hard and fast divisions between populations, which is what race purports to be.