Assessing the association between subsistence strategies and the timing of weaning among indigenous archaeological populations of the Caribbean
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Human breastfeeding is a biocultural process shaped by the interaction of numerous biological, cultural, economic, and social factors. Although previous studies have found that a society's subsistence economy alone does not determine weaning timing, subsistence may still have a profound effect on weaning food choices. This paper analyses nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes in bone collagen and apatite of individuals from six precolonial Caribbean sites grouped into four subsistence categories: Hunter‐Fisher‐Gatherers (Cueva del Perico I and Cueva Calero, Cuba), Horticulturalists (Canímar Abajo, Cuba), Agriculturalists from the Antilles (Paso del Indio, Puerto Rico), and Agriculturalists of Mesoamerica (Marco Gonzalez and San Pedro, Belize) in order to explore how subsistence economy affected the different groups' breastfeeding and weaning practices. Ages for the start and the end of weaning, and the isotopic characteristics of possible food sources used as supplements during the weaning process, were assessed using the Bayesian probability model “Weaning Age Reconstruction with Nitrogen isotopes.” Model results indicate (a) a major dietary change around 2 years of age for most of the study populations, (b) that supplements seem to have been introduced into nonadults diet at earlier ages than has been observed in ethnographic populations of the area, (c) no direct correlation between the start of weaning and the availability of cultigens, but (d) that groups that had access to cultigens would appear to have weaned their children using foods with lower nitrogen isotope values, suggesting that plants (likely domesticates) may have had an important role as weaning foods.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| 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 it