Over the last four decades, bioarchaeology has experienced significant technical growth and theoretical maturation. Early 21st century bioarchaeology may also be enhanced from a renewed engagement with the concept of biological stress. New insights on biological stress and disease can be gained from cross-disciplinary perspectives regarding human skeletal variation and disease. First, pathophysiologic and molecular signaling mechanisms can provide more precise understandings regarding formation of pathological phenotypes in bone. Using periosteal new bone formation as an example, various mechanisms and pathways are explored in which new bone can be formed under conditions of biological stress, particularly in bone microenvironments that involve inflammatory changes. Second, insights from human biology are examined regarding some epigenetic factors and disease etiology. While epigenetic effects on stress and disease outcomes appear profoundly influential, they are mostly invisible in skeletal tissue. However, some indirect and downstream effects, such as the developmental origins of adult health outcomes, may be partially observable in bioarchaeological data. Emerging perspectives from the human microbiome are also considered. Microbiomics involves a remarkable potential to understand ancient biology, disease, and stress. Third, tools from epidemiology are examined that may aid bioarchaeologists to better cope with some of the inherent limitations of skeletal samples to better measure and quantify the expressions of skeletal stress markers. Such cross-disciplinary synergisms hopefully will promote more complete understandings of health and stress in bioarchaeological science.
Amelogenin genes are located on both X and Y sex chromosomes in humans and are a major focus of DNA-based sex estimation methods. Amelogenin proteins, AMELX_HUMAN and AMELY_HUMAN, are expressed in the tooth organ and play a major role in mineralization of enamel, the most taphonomically resistant, archaeologically persistent human tissue. We describe shotgun liquid chromatography mass spectrometry analysis of 40 enamel samples representing 25 individuals, including modern third molars and archaeological teeth from open-air contexts including permanent adult (400-7300 BP) and deciduous teeth (100-1000 BP). Peptides specific to the X-chromosome isoform of amelogenin were detected in all samples. Peptides specific to the sexually dimorphic Y-chromosome isoform were also detected in 26 samples from 13 individuals, across all time periods, including previously unsexed deciduous teeth from archaeological contexts. While the signal of each gene product can vary by more than an order of magnitude, we show close agreement between osteological and amelogenin-based sex estimation and thus demonstrate that the protein-based signal can reliably be obtained from open-air archaeological contexts dating to at least 7300 years ago. While samples with AMELY_HUMAN peptides are unambiguously male, samples with no AMELY_HUMAN signal may either be low signal male false negative samples or female samples. In order to estimate sex in these samples we developed a probability curve of female sex as a function of the logarithm of AMELX_HUMAN signal (p < 0.0001) using logistic regression. This is also the first demonstration using proteomics to estimate sex in deciduous teeth and pushes back the application of the method to teeth that are at least 7300 years old.
This study tests the hypothesis that the colonial economy of the Lambayeque region of northern coastal Peru was associated with a mechanically strenuous lifestyle among the indigenous Mochica population. To test the hypothesis, we documented the changes in the prevalence of degenerative joint disease (or DJD) in human remains from the late pre-Hispanic and colonial Lambayeque Valley Complex. Comparisons were made using multivariate odds ratios calculated across four age classes and 11 principle joint systems corresponding to 113 late pre-Hispanic and 139 postcontact adult Mochica individuals. Statistically significant patterns of elevated postcontact DJD prevalence are observed in the joint systems of the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and knee. More finely grained comparison between temporal phases indicates that increases in prevalence were focused immediately following contact in the Early/Middle Colonial period. Analysis of DJD by sex indicates postcontact males experienced greater DJD prevalence than females. Also, trends between pre- and postcontact females indicate nearly universally elevated DJD prevalence among native colonial women. Inferred altered behavioral uses of the upper body and knee are contextualized within ecological, ethnohistoric, and ethnoarchaeological frameworks and appear highly consistent with descriptions of the local postcontact economy. These patterns of DJD appear to stem from a synergism of broad, hemispheric level sociopolitical alterations, specific changes to Mochica activity and behavior, regional economic intensification, and local microenvironmental characteristics, which were all focused into these biological outcomes by the operation of a colonial Spanish political economy on the north coast of Peru from A.D. 1536 to 1751.
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