Exploring variation in infant feeding practices in Byzantine Greece using stable isotope analysis of dentin serial sections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Infant feeding practices are explored in the early Byzantine Greek site of Nemea (5th–6th centuries) to better understand breastfeeding, weaning, and early diet of children in ancient Greece. Dentin serial sections were obtained from the permanent first molars and first premolars of 26 adults (seven males, eight females, and 11 of unknown sex) and analyzed for stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes. The isotopic data demonstrated that most individuals were breastfed and were fully weaned by around 2.6 years on average (range 1.8 to 3.6 years). A range of infant feeding practices was observed at Nemea. Some individuals were breastfed, while others were never breastfed or consumed breast milk for a short period of time, yet survived to adulthood. Sex‐based differences were not found as males and females were fully weaned at an average of 2.5 (1.9–3.3 years) and 2.4 (1.9–3.6 years) years, respectively. This is an important finding given the contradictory evidence of written sources regarding preferential treatment of male and female infants. Compared with traditional bulk analyses of subadult bone collagen, this study illustrates the utility of additional information obtained from dentin serial sections for capturing the nuances of infant feeding practices in ancient societies.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".