| Abstract: |
Article disagrees with Wood et al. (1992). <p> pg 630</br> Epidemiological theory predicts an increase in infection parasite rates with sedentism and larger group size, supporting the direct interpretation of this pattern of pathology in the skeletons. Moreover, the pattern of increasing infection parasites with group size and sedentism occurs repeatedly in comparisons of historical and modern populations (Cohen 1989). Simarily, modern hunter-gatherers display very little rates of juvenile infection, Malnutrition, and anemia, just as their prehistoric counterparts display low rates of porotic hyperostosis. Contemporary hunter-gatherers also display relatively little rates of weanling diarrhea, thought to be a major contributor to enamel hypoplasia, so the low rates of hypoplasia in prehistoric forgery should not be surprising. Tuberculosis and related diseases occur primarily in archaeological samples from recent, relatively urban environments, mimicking the pattern of the disease of the present day (Cohen 1989). Goodman (1993) has pointed out, also, that enamel hypoplasia, one a few skeletal pathologies that can readily be seen in living individuals, has repeatedly been found to occur among living people in the pattern that are hypothesis predicts -- it is regularly more common in lower class than in upper class individuals, suggesting that it reflects relative stress rather than relative background nutrition or resilience. <p> Wood et al. assume that survivorship was significantly greater in early agricultural groups than in hunter-gatherers. Optimal forging data suggest that praise toward hunter gatherers were in a position to descending to agriculture as one superior economic strategies had to be abandoned. Hunter-gatherers should typically have had better background nutrition than farmers and should normally have been more resilient even though the stresses of mobility itself might have worked against them. <p> pg 631</br> Samples of death in a population will always include both the selected and a random component. It is suggested that under most circumstances the effects of selection will show up only as relatively minor statistical currents against the background of competing factors.
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