Taphonomy, pathology, and paleoecology of the terminal Pleistocene Marmes Rockshelter (45FR50) “big elk” (<i>Cervus elaphus</i>), southeastern Washington State, USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1968, remains of what were reported to be a larger-than-modern elk ( Cervus elaphus ) were recovered from terminal Pleistocene sediments associated with the Marmes Rockshelter archaeological site in southeastern Washington State. Originally thought to have been butchered by humans, it is associated with radiocarbon dates suggesting an age of about 980014C years B.P. Taphonomic analysis in 2009 indicates the elk likely died of natural causes during winter months; it was lightly scavenged by carnivores prior to burial from silt-rich spring runoff. The elk suffered from two pathological conditions: one resulting in fusion of the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, and the other resulting in excessive bone tissue on the proximal ends of the first ribs, seventh cervical, and first and second thoracic vertebrae. The Marmes elk is larger than modern Rocky Mountain elk ( C. e. nelsoni ) and is on the large end of the size range of modern Roosevelt elk ( C. e. roosevelti ). It is also larger than the similarly aged elk skeleton from Three Hills, Alberta. A single elk bone from the Sentinel Gap archaeological site in central Washington State, dated to about 10 20014C years BP and located 130 km west of Marmes Rockshelter, is the same size as the same bone of the Marmes elk. Terminal Pleistocene elk in eastern Washington likely grew to exceptionally large size as a result of abundant grass at the time, forage that decreased in abundance as Holocene climatic conditions developed.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".