What To Do with Long Bones: Toward a Progressive Palaeoauxology - Hoppa - 2000

There has been renewed interest in the study of growth of development of past populations by physical anthropologists over the past decade. A variety of approaches have been used in an attempt to bring some sense of statistical rigour to the use of linear growth as a proxy for health and well-being within a population. This paper presents an overview of these techniques, and then discusses alternative approaches for the analysis of skeletal growth data. Simply put, any observed distribution of anthropometric data can be thought of being composed of several underlying sub-distributions, which cannot be readily differentiated but may be of intrinsic interest to the skeletal biologist. Various techniques, including finite mixture analysis, can be used to estimate the contribution or proportion of those unobserved sub-distributions, and provide a potentially powerful, but as yet under-exploited avenue of investigations for future studies in palaeoauxology.

Keywords

Palaeoauxology - Diaphyseal growth - Ageing - Osteology

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