Comment on ‘Krapina atlases suggest a high prevalence of anatomical variations in the first cervical vertebra of Neanderthals’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A review of the observation of an anterior cleft on the atlas of a Neanderthal from Krapina. We read with interest the article published in the Journal of Anatomy by Palancar et al. (2020), about anatomical variations in the first cervical vertebra of the Krapina Neanderthals. This is a welcomed contribution to furthering our understanding of developmental and congenital anomalies in hominins. While the article provides detailed and sustained arguments for its general interpretations and conclusions, we believe there is one correction that needs to be done. Specifically, Palancar et al. (2020) state that Krapina 99 (Kr.99) ‘is a right lateral mass of an adult atlas’, with a completely fused transverse process ‘without any sign of active ossification’, and with ‘a non-fused anterior atlas arch (anterior atlas arch cleft)’ (Palancar et al., 2020: 3). The authors continue the description of the anterior synchondrosis in Kr.99 as exhibiting ‘the presence of a porous-like surface quite similar to that described previously in the literature (Ríos et al., 2015; Sanchis-Gimeno et al., 2017) that support the diagnosis of anatomical variations. In addition, and in line with the observations made by Ríos et al. (2015) in El Sidrón Neanderthals, the surface of the synchondrosis of Kr.99 was uniform. It also supports the diagnosis of a non-fusion of the anterior atlas arch (anterior atlas cleft) in Kr.99.’ (Palancar et al., 2020: 3). In the context of recent findings about skeletal anomalies in Pleistocene hominins (Ríos et al., 2015, 2019; Gómez-Olivencia et al., 2018; Rmoutilová et al., 2020), and as summarized by Trinkaus (2018), the review of known individuals or collections may provide insights into aspects of survival, stress, consanguinity and mortuary behaviour among these foraging populations. The study by Palancar et al. (2020) is another step in that direction, but in our opinion the evidence presented by the authors does not support the consideration of Kr.99 as a Neanderthal adult atlas vertebra with an anterior cleft. This Neanderthal specimen probably corresponds to a late juvenile atlas vertebra with a non-fused anterior synchondrosis. L.R designed the research. L.R. and H.C contributed to acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data. L.R. and H.C. contributed to drafting, revision and approval of the manuscript.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".