Deconstructing death in paleodemography

Konigsberg, Lyle W.; Frankenberg, Susan R.

doi:10.1002/ajpa.10039

Cited by 111 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…They note that mean ages of some root stages in South Africans were earlier than Germans and mean ages in Japanese were later than Germans and they recommend population-specific reference data. The use of mean/median ages to estimate age has been questioned and age of transition into maturity stages (including probit regression analysis) is now seen as more appropriate to estimate age and to compare groups (Boldsen et al, 2002;Konigsberg & Frankenberg, 2002;Konigsberg et al, 2008).…”

Section: Comparison Between Northern and Western Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The timing of mandibular tooth formation in two African groups

Elamin

Hector

Liversidge

2016

Annals of Human Biology

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Background: Ethnic differences in the timing of human tooth development are unclear. Aim: To describe similarities and differences in the timing of tooth formation in two groups of Sudanese children and young adults. Subjects and methods: The sample consisted of healthy individuals from Khartoum, Sudan, aged 2-23 years. The Northern group was of Arab origin (848 males, 802 females) and the Western group was of African origin (846 males, 402 females). Each mandibular left permanent tooth from first incisor to third molar was assessed from dental radiographs into one of 15 development stages. Mean ages at entry for 306 tooth stages were calculated using probit regression in males/females in each group and compared using a t-test. Results: Mean ages were not significantly different in most tooth stage comparisons between ethnic groups for both males (61/75) and females (56/76), despite a tendency of earlier mean ages in the Western group. Mean ages for most tooth stage comparisons between males and females (137/155) were not significantly different within ethnic groups suggesting low sexual dimorphism. Conclusion: The mean ages of most mandibular tooth formation stages were generally not significantly different between ethnic groups or between males and females in this study.

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Section: Comparison Between Northern and Western Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The timing of mandibular tooth formation in two African groups

Elamin

Hector

Liversidge

2016

Annals of Human Biology

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“…Dr. Judy Suchey scored the Suchey sample, whereas the Coimbra sample was scored by Ana Santos. Interestingly, in our reanalysis of Loisy-en-Brie based on trabecular involution data from the femoral head presented in BocquetAppel and Bacro (1997), and using their data from Coimbra as the reference sample, our Gompertz model produced a likelihood ratio chi-square with an associated P-value of 0.9829 (Konigsberg and Frankenberg, 2002). We thus had no indication that Coimbra and Loisy-en-Brie differed for "genetic or life factors" affecting patterns of trabecular involution by age.…”

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Reply to comments by Jackes: Interobserver error and goodness‐of‐fit tests in paleodemography

Konigsberg

Frankenberg

2003

American J Phys Anthropol

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Mary Jackes' comments on our previous article (Konigsberg and Frankenberg, 2002) contain the important lesson, that either: 1) good methods applied to good data can produce bad results if important assumptions are violated, or 2) good methods applied to bad data can produce bad results (the "garbage in, garbage out" maxim). Jackes appears to incline toward the first explanation in her comment, while we show in this reply that the second possibility is more parsimonious. Jackes' conclusion that her "test has shown that iterative proportional fitting does not provide an accurate mean adult age at death" also suggests that she is arguing that the specific method is bad.Our first issue with Jackes' comments is her statement that "a floating point error makes it impossible to iterate 17 ages for six stages." We noted in our article that when the number of age classes is greater than the number of stages, the "iterative proportional fitting procedure" (IPFP) is inappropriate and should not be used. It is often possible in such cases to run an IPFP program and produce output, but when there are more ages than stages, that output is uninterpretable gibberish. Jackes notes in the first paragraph of her comment that "the number of age groups is constrained by the number of morphological stages, a disadvantage of IPFP," and yet she then goes on to run an IPFP using 16 age categories and only six pubic symphyseal stages. It is not simply our "opinion" (quoting Jackes) that such an application is improper; using the method in this way is statistically invalid (see Clark 1981, p. 299; Kimura and Chikuni, 1987, p. 28; Hoenig and Heisey, 1987, p. 235).Our second issue with Jackes' argument is that she does not employ a goodness-of-fit statistic to evaluate the IPFP when applied properly (her six stage and five age classes example). One should calculate some form of goodness-of-fit statistic when fitting models in order to both identify the more parsimonious models and assure that the model adequately reproduces the observed data (counts in stages). To quote from Hoenig and Heisey (1987, p. 235The main assumption of our procedure is described by equation (1); the misclassification rates are the same for samples 1 and 2. This can be tested with either a likelihood ratio or Pearson chi-square goodness-of-fit test with J Ϫ I degrees of freedom.

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“…Reference skeletons of known age are used to validate age indicators, but the criticism of much past practice in paleodemography is that age distributions for skeletons tend to mimic the underlying age distribution of reference populations (Bouquet-Appel and Masset, 1982). While certainly not all agree (Van Gerven and Armelagos, 1983), most researchers seem to accept this as a problem and have forwarded solutions (Chamberlain, 2001;Hoppa and Vaupel, 2002;Konigsberg and Frankenberg, 2002).…”

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“…From personal experience, the method also makes clear the age range present in the sample and discourages underestimating how many older individuals are present. The seriation method has been recently criticized because it really does not solve the problem of mimicry of the reference sample and also does not provide for the measurement of statistical uncertainty in age estimates that many researchers now believe must be part of the process (Konigsberg and Frankenberg, 2002).…”

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An elusive paleodemography? A comparison of two methods for estimating the adult age distribution of deaths at late Classic Copan, Honduras

Storey

2006

American J Phys Anthropol

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Comparison of different adult age estimation methods on the same skeletal sample with unknown ages could forward paleodemographic inference, while researchers sort out various controversies. The original aging method for the auricular surface (Lovejoy et al., 1985a) assigned an age estimation based on several separate characteristics. Researchers have found this original method hard to apply. It is usually forgotten that before assigning an age, there was a seriation, an ordering of all available individuals from youngest to oldest. Thus, age estimation reflected the place of an individual within its sample. A recent article (Buckberry and Chamberlain, 2002) proposed a revised method that scores theses various characteristics into age stages, which can then be used with a Bayesian method to estimate an adult age distribution for the sample. Both methods were applied to the adult auricular surfaces of a Pre-Columbian Maya skeletal population from Copan, Honduras and resulted in age distributions with significant numbers of older adults. However, contrary to the usual paleodemographic distribution, one Bayesian estimation based on uniform prior probabilities yielded a population with 57% of the ages at death over 65, while another based on a high mortality life table still had 12% of the individuals aged over 75 years. The seriation method yielded an age distribution more similar to that known from preindustrial historical situations, without excessive longevity of adults. Paleodemography must still wrestle with its elusive goal of accurate adult age estimation from skeletons, a necessary base for demographic study of past populations.

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Deconstructing death in paleodemography

Cited by 111 publications

References 42 publications

The timing of mandibular tooth formation in two African groups

The timing of mandibular tooth formation in two African groups

Reply to comments by Jackes: Interobserver error and goodness‐of‐fit tests in paleodemography

An elusive paleodemography? A comparison of two methods for estimating the adult age distribution of deaths at late Classic Copan, Honduras

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