Skeletal biological distance studies in American Physical Anthropology: Recent trends

Abstract

Biological distance analysis, the dominant type of skeletal biological research during the 19th century, has become less visible in recent years. Although the proportion of American Journal of Physical Anthropology articles and published abstracts focusing on biodistance has remained fairly constant over the three decades between 1955 and 1985, the proportion of biodistance contributions relative to other skeletal biology studies has decreased. Emphasis in skeletal biology has shifted from the analysis of biological variation to investigations of health and diet, and within biodistance studies methodological issues have assumed prominence over purely analytical approaches. This paper investigates trends in biological distance analysis through a survey of articles and meetings abstracts published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology from 1955 to 1985. The survey provides the historical context for five symposium papers on skeletal biological distance presented at the 1986 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Do nuclear DNA and dental nonmetric data produce similar reconstructions of regional population history? An example from modern coastal Kenya

“…Many regional studies examine populations within a single country (e.g., Guatelli-Steinberg et al, 2001), region of a country (e.g., Hubbard, 2012), or bordering countries (e.g., Ullinger et al, 2005). As noted by Buikstra et al (1990), this more refined focus is common in the 5" " bioarchaeological literature and is reflected in an array of more recent publications (e.g., see Blom et al, 1998;Irish, 2006;Coppa et al, 2007;Sołtysiak and Bialon., 2013;Willermet et al, 2013;Irish et al, 2014). Such regional studies often focus on understanding mobility patterns (e.g., McIlvaine et al, 2014), trading networks (Ragsdale and Edgar, 2014), and other social phenomena (e.g., see Knudson and Stojanowski, 2008).…”

“…The pseudo-D 2 statistic was used in the present study and calculated using an executable program by Konigsberg (1990). A benefit of the pseudo-D 2 statistic is that it accounts for trait intercorrelation and weights correlated traits (rather than removing them from the sample).…”

“…A cursory review of the current literature suggests that, while some biodistance studies use both skeletal and ancient DNA data (e.g., Corruccini et al, 2002), a proportionally higher number rely on skeletal variants alone (for a review see Buikstra et al, 1990). In recent years, variants in dental morphology have become a favored dataset because (Scott and Turner, 1997): 1) crown morphology is not altered, except by wear or pathology, after the period of crown formation, 2) dental variants are highly heritable (60 to 80%), and 3) dental variants vary widely in frequency across populations.…”

The value of infracranial nonmetric variation in studies of modernHomo sapiens: An Australian focus

“…It may be that the interest in in- fracranial nonmetric traits has coincided with a decline in biologic distance studies. A survey of skeletal biologic distance studies (Buikstra et al, 1990) showed a shift away from such studies from 1965 to 1980, with a slight increase in 1986. It also noted a shift away from interracial and interpopulation studies to those of intraregional and intrasite distance studies.…”

Dental metric variability associated with human migration from skeletal remains of two Jomon sites (Yoshigo and Inariyama) in the Atsumi Peninsula area

“…Recently, biodistance studies have been employed to reveal intrasite genetic variation (Buikstra et al, 1990;Stojanowski and Schillaci, 2006). This technique has been applied several times to Jomon populations (Kondo, 1994;Matsumura and Nishimoto, 1996) and has also been cross-checked against ancient DNA data (Shinoda et al, 1998;Adachi et al, 2003Adachi et al, , 2006.…”