Bioarchaeology: Interpreting behavior from the human skeleton

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that it never dies peacefully. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent-and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Enthesopathies--that is, ''musculo-skeletal stress markers''--are frequently used to reconstruct past lifestyles and activity patterns. Relatively little attention has been paid in physical anthropology to methodological gaps implicit in this approach: almost all methods previously employed neglect current medical insights into enthesopathies and the distinction between healthy and pathological aspects has been arbitrary. This study presents a new visual method of studying fibrocartilaginous enthesopathies of the upper limb (modified from Villotte: Bull Me'm Soc Anthropol Paris n.s. 18 (2006) 65-85), and application of this method to 367 males who died between the 18th and 20th centuries, from four European identified skeletal collections: the Christ Church Spitalfields Collection, the identified skeletal collection of the anthropological museum of the University of Coimbra, and the Sassari and Bologna collections of the museum of Anthropology, University of Bologna. The analysis, using generalized estimating equations to model repeated binary outcome variables, has established a strong link between enthesopathies and physical activity: men with occupations involving heavy manual tasks have significantly (P-value < 0.001) more lesions of the upper limbs than nonmanual and light manual workers. Probability of the presence of an enthesopathy also increases with age and is higher for the right side compared with the left. Our study failed to distinguish significant differences between the collections when adjusted for the other effects. It appears that enthesopathies can be used to reconstruct past lifestyles of populations if physical anthropologists: 1) pay attention to the choice of entheses in their studies and 2) use appropriate methods.

Enthesopathies as occupational stress markers: Evidence from the upper limb

Darwin speculated that bipedalism might have contributed to humans' unique ability to throw things so well. Although some primates, including our closest relatives chimpanzees, will throw objects now and then, their throws do not come close to matching the speed and accuracy achieved by even young human boys. Neil Roach and colleagues analysed the biomechanics of collegiate baseball players' throwing motion in order to better understand the evolution of this novel behaviour. Their findings show that adaptations in the human upper body allow us to store and release elastic energy in the shoulder in a catapult-like fashion. Evidence of these key shifts in morphology that make this energy storage possible is preserved in the hominin fossil record. From these fossils, the authors infer that the ability to throw objects with high speed probably arose with Homo erectus, and may have had a crucial role in early hunting.

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/11879202/3785139.pdf?sequence=1

Elastic energy storage in the shoulder and the evolution of high-speed throwing in Homo

Thank you very much for downloading human skeletal remains excavation analysis interpretation. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have look hundreds times for their chosen readings like this human skeletal remains excavation analysis interpretation, but end up in harmful downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they juggled with some malicious virus inside their desktop computer.

Human Skeletal Remains Excavation Analysis Interpretation

Human skeletal research aimed at reconstructing past activities has had a long and checkered history. In recent years, in fact, it has been embraced as a kind of “Holy Grail” by an entire subfield of human osteology. The quest, however, has proven more hazardous than most of us would have imagined. Many types of bone changes have been proposed as “markers” of activity, occupation, or mechanical stress. Three major research areas have been thought to show the most promise and, consequently, have been most actively pursued: osteoarthritis, musculoskeletal stress markers, and cross-sectional bone geometry.As might be expected, most contributors to this volume focus on pathological conditions as identified in human remains. As has been widely recognized, some of the bone changes seen in osteoarthritis that have routinely been used to reconstruct activity are also sometimes pathological. In addition, much of the complex physiolog-ical change that occurs at muscle attachment sites (entheses) also involves inherently pathological processes—a basic consideration that has not yet been generally acknowledged by bioarchaeologists. In recent years many paleopathologists have actively pursued this type of research under the broad rubric of what Jane Buikstra

Bioarchaeology's Holy Grail: The Reconstruction of Activity

Over the past two decades, many articles have been published on entheseal changes (usually called ‘Musculoskeletal Stress Markers’) as activity markers in past societies. Over-simplified methods and over-interpretation of past activities have generated strong critiques of research results in this area of enquiry. While some significant improvements regarding the recording systems for entheseal changes have been applied more recently, many bioarchaeologists appear not yet to be fully aware of the multi-factorial aetiology of these alterations. In this article, we review the anatomical and clinical literature to discuss some of the difficulties associated with the recording of entheseal changes and the multiple factors leading to their appearance in the human skeleton. Thus far, fibrocartilaginous entheses appear to hold more promise for activity-related reconstruction than do fibrous ones, but these relationships remain an area of active research interest. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

/pdf/understanding-entheseal-changes-definition-and-life-course-4a3q1l9vdc.pdf

Understanding Entheseal Changes: Definition and Life Course Changes

Bone remodelling in the areas of entheses is frequently supposed to be associated with physical stress and the activity patterns of ancient populations. The main aim of this study was to analyse the prevalence of enthesopathies among individuals living in different life conditions. A total of 197 individuals from the Early Medieval (9th century) Mikulcice site were analysed for enthesopathies - 117 adult individuals from Mikulcice castle and 80 individuals from its hinterland. While the inhabitants of the castle were probably ranked among the higher echelons of society, the hinterland was predominantly inhabited by a farming population. It is hypothesized that individuals from the castle were exposed to lower physical stress than individuals from the hinterland. 9 fibrocartilaginous entheses of the upper and lower limbs were evaluated. Enthesopathies occurred in at least one enthesis in 76% of individuals younger than 50 years of age. Significant differences were observed in the occurrence of enthesopathies between castle and hinterland. Males from the agricultural hinterland show the highest prevalence of enthesopathies of all the population groups, while the lowest prevalence of the marker was recorded in males from the castle. Females in the castle were more affected by entheseal changes than females from the hinterland. Sexual dimorphism was more evident in the hinterland. The present study confirmed presumptions based on the archaeological finds, especially for males. This hypothesis cannot be accepted for females. We may suppose that in the 9th century, women living in Mikulcice castle did not represent a privileged social class. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

/pdf/enthesopathies-and-activity-patterns-in-the-early-medieval-3o5mfxots9.pdf

Enthesopathies and activity patterns in the Early Medieval Great Moravian population: Evidence of division of labour

Over the last twenty years, many studies have used enthesopathies as an indicator of the behaviour of past populations. However, in these works, the distinction between healthy and pathological aspects has been arbitrary. Moreover the lack of standardised observation methods exacerbates this problem and limits the comparison between different studies. The aim of this study is to propose a new method of studying enthesopathies based on present medical data. It is possible to distinguish two types of entheses according to the nature of the tissue of insertion: fibrous or fibrocartilaginous. The variations between normal and pathological aspects based on this distinction enable the proposition of four generic scoring systems. These systems were applied to 18 sites of appendicular insertions and spinal column insertions of yellow ligaments. Under each system, three scoring stages are defined representing different stages of the remodelling process. The first three groups include fibrocartilaginous insertions. We used anatomical and anatomopathological descriptions to define the stages. Such descriptions are rare for the fourth group which concerns

Sébastien Villotte

Papers

Enthesopathies as occupational stress markers: Evidence from the upper limb

Bioarchaeology's Holy Grail: The Reconstruction of Activity

Understanding Entheseal Changes: Definition and Life Course Changes

Enthesopathies and activity patterns in the Early Medieval Great Moravian population: Evidence of division of labour

Connaissances médicales actuelles, cotation des enthésopathies : nouvelle méthode new scoring system of enthesopathies based on present medical data