Bioarchaeological investigation of an obstetric death at Huigou site (3900–2900 BC), Henan, China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Historical documents record that many young women died of pregnancy, delivery, or related complications. However, such cases are rare archaeologically due to the limitations of archaeological materials. Here, we report the case of an adult female buried with an infant in the Neolithic graveyard of Huigou (Yangshao Culture, 3900–2900 BCE) in China's Henan Province. The remains of the infant were positioned between the lower legs of the adult. Both appear to have died during or shortly after delivery, as the estimated age of the infant is full term. The adult female's pubic symphysis was unusually long compared with a modern Chinese reference sample, a trait that increases the risk of dystocia in modern clinical cases. The pelvis also shows a hyperplastic lesion on the superior margin of the pubic symphysis that might reflect a prior difficult birth that was survived. Taken together this evidence suggests a history of obstetric problems that ultimately led to the death of the woman and her last child. Our reconstruction offers a glimpse of an ancient life, suggesting the difficulties this woman suffered in childbirth before her death and illustrating the insights that osteology can offer into obstetric experiences in the past.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".