Population history and economic change in the last 2000 years in KwaZulu-Natal, RSA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports on craniometric and stable isotopic analyses of archaeological human skeletons from KwaZulu-Natal and investigates biological and cultural (dietary) changes associated with the beginnings of a settled agricultural way of life. Through multivariate craniometrics, archaeological specimens were compared to three groups of recent South Africans (Nguni, Sotho-Tswana and Khoesan). Morphological differences, especially for the face, were observed through time: individuals older than 400 AD tended to be closer to groups of Khoesan ancestry; in contrast, remains from the first millennium AD are closer to Sotho-Tswana and Nguni groups. Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of bone collagen indicated that pre-400 AD hunter-gatherers ate more marine foods than individuals dating from later times, whose isotopic values are consistent with substantial reliance on African grain crops and domesticated stock. The small sample size and high intra-population variation have made the results difficult to interpret in terms of diachronic phenomena or biological changes (population replacement and gene flow). Nevertheless, these preliminary observations on both morphology and nutrition are consistent with the hypothesis that the Early Iron Age ‘package’, including agriculture, was introduced by an immigrant ‘Negroid ’ population, possibly corresponding to Bantu speakers. This is the first direct biological anthropological evidence for a major population change at this time. Indigenous Khoesan hunter-gatherers are likely to have been partly assimilated and partly replaced by incoming agriculturists.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".