An ill child among mid‐Holocene foragers of Southern Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The skeletal remains of an infant from a southwest South African rock shelter at Byneskranskop show pervasive abnormalities that are consistent with the effects of hypertrophic (hyperplastic) rickets. Diagnostic features include beading of the costochondral junctions of the ribs, flaring and tilting of the metaphyses, and cupping of the distal ulna, as well as general skeletal hypertrophy. With an uncalibrated accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon date of 4820 +/- 90 BP (TO-9531), this is a very early instance of the condition, among foragers whose environment and diet make dietary shortages of active vitamin D or dietary calcium improbable. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios indicate a mixed diet, including marine as well as terrestrial protein. Solicitous care maintained the sick infant to an estimated age of 3.5-5 months; it was buried in a manner like that of other deceased group members. This case suggests that if infanticide was practiced, it was an option only during the immediate perinatal period, when this infant would have appeared normal. This is consistent with documentation of infanticide practices among historic foragers from southern Africa.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".