The Tsimane’ Amazonian Panel Study (TAPS): Nine years (2002–2010) of annual data available to the public

Abstract

This brief communication contains a description of the 2002-2010 annual panel collected by the Tsimane’ Amazonian Panel Study team. The study took place among the Tsimane’, a native Amazonian society of forager-horticulturalists. The team tracked a wide range of socio-economic and anthropometric variables from all residents (633 adults ≥16 years; 820 children) in 13 villages along the Maniqui River, department of Beni. The panel is ideally suited to examine how market exposure and modernization affect the well-being of a highly autarkic population and to examine human growth in a non-Western rural setting.

Color naming across languages reflects color use

“…These results support the idea that color is not as useful for Tsimane' as it is for English and Bolivian-Spanish, consistent with findings in other non-Western groups (36). The Tsimane' have an extensive botanical vocabulary (14), which might obviate the need for color terms in their culture, which is heavily dependent on natural objects. Our results in a contrastive-naming task (Fig.…”

“…To evaluate this possibility, we obtained extensive color-labeling data using two extreme versions of how the WCS instructions might have been implemented: a "free-choice" paradigm that placed no restrictions on how participants could name colors, and a "fixed-choice" paradigm on separate participants, where participants were constrained to only say the most common terms we obtained in the free-choice paradigm. We conducted experiments in three groups: the Tsimane' people, an indigenous nonindustrialized Amazonian group consisting of about 6,000 people from lowland Bolivia who live by farming, hunting, and foraging for subsistence (14); English speakers in the United States; and BolivianSpanish speakers in Bolivia, neighboring the Tsimane'. Tsimane' is one of two languages in an isolate language family (Mosetenan).…”

Malnutrition‐related early childhood exposures and enamel defects in the permanent dentition: A longitudinal study from the Bolivian Amazon

“…This current study was based on a prospective cohort study that began in 2002, the 9-year Tsimane’ Amazonian Panel Study (TAPS) (Leonard et al 2015). In 2015, researchers followed up a sample of adolescents, aged 10–17 years, who were enrolled as young children (between 1 and 5 years) in TAPS and added measures of enamel defects in the permanent dentition.…”

“…Since the permanent central maxillary incisors were the teeth of focus in this analysis, childhood exposure measures were restricted to 1 through 4 years of age. Childhood data were collected annually by the TAPS study team between 2002 and 2010 (Leonard et al 2015). Growth stunting was measured on a continuous scale using mean height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) from 1 through 4 years of age.…”

“…Household SES was measured using total wealth, a locally-developed sum of 23 traditional and modern capital measured by value in the local currency (bolivianos, Bs) that reflects economic standing (Leonard et al 2015). Interviews in participants’ homes were used to characterize dietary intake for certain foods for one week, including traditional foods (plantain and manioc ( yuca )) or processed, market-based food (sugar), measured in kilograms (kg) (Leonard et al 2015). …”