Early Holocene Human Burials from Fa Hien-lena and Kuragala, Sri Lanka
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Few human burials from Sri Lankan archaeological contexts have been described. Here we report on the analysis of two early Holocene skeletons, FH8, a young adult female skeleton excavated from Fa Hien-lena and dated to 10,640-10,139 cal BP, and BK1, a middle adult male skeleton excavated at Kuragala and dated to 7,170-6,950 cal BP. The skeletons are both highly fragmentary, which poses challenges for their thorough analysis. However, this paper describes the archaeological context, mortuary treatment and archaeothanatology of the burials, post-mortem taphonomy of human remains, the osteobiography of both individuals, and some general observations on their morphology relative to one another and a broader range of late Pleistocene and Holocene foragers. The results demonstrate common elements of funerary treatment between these two burials, such as interment on the left side with right hands placed near or over the face. The FH8 individual died at a young age and shows some signs of early childhood stress. Both skeletons show moderate to high degrees of tooth wear for their relative ages, and no evidence for dental disease. The body size estimates of FH8 and BK1 fall in the range that would be expected of tropical or temperate forest foragers, although BK1 has a relatively low body mass relative to stature, which aligns his phenotype with populations of more arid environments. We demonstrate that much can be potentially learned about human populations and prehistoric behaviours from skeletal analyses.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".