Body size among Holocene foragers of the Cape Ecozone, southern Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Temporal and geographic variability in adult body size can be a useful indicator of a population's adaptation. The southern African Cape supported foraging populations exclusively until some pastoralism is seen, ca. 2000 BP. This paper describes and interprets body-size patterns among foragers, as deduced from maximum femoral lengths and femoral head diameters, using 127 individually dated adult skeletons from the western (70) and southern (57) regions of the Cape (64 male, 60 female, 3 sex undetermined). Estimated statures are comparable to historic Khoesan samples, but show lower values and greater variance during the fifth/fourth millennium before the present among both sexes and both biomes. Variation in femoral length does not correlate with diet protein, as reflected in stable isotope (delta(13)C and delta(15)N) values. Positive correlations between femoral head diameter and isotopic indicators suggest greater body mass with more reliance on marine protein. A decline in femoral length begins at around 4000 BP, a time when archaeologists suggest that population growth led to the incorporation of lower-ranked food resources, and to reduced mobility. A clearly identifiable linear recovery, beginning at around 3000 BP, greatly predates the earliest evidence of pastoralism on the Cape. Apparent problems of food sufficiency were addressed and solved, within a hunting and gathering economy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".