From Forests to the Coast - Multidisciplinary Investigation of Human Adaptations at the Mini-athiliya Shell Midden, Sri Lanka
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last three decades, Sri Lanka has risen to international prominence as a key area for exploring past forager adaptations. Much of this discussion has focused on the lowland rainforests of the Wet Zone of the island, and their preservation of the earliest fossils of our species, bone tools, and microlithic technologies in the region ca. 45,000 years ago. It has been recognized that the northern and southern coasts of Sri Lanka represent crucial locales for studying human occupation and adaptation through the Pleistocene and Holocene. Here, we revisit the important shell midden site of Mini-athiliya (dating to ca. 4,000 cal. years BP), on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, which has yielded human remains alongside microlithic stone tools and animal remains. We present a comparative analysis of body size variation of the human remains belonging to the HMA 6 adult skeleton from Mini-athiliya with a wider database of foragers to investigate local adaptations. We also apply stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis to the tooth enamel of four other individuals documented at Mini-athiliya in order to determine their dietary reliance on forest, grassland, or coastal resources. Together, our results highlight that, rather than a clear distinction between earlier forest adaptations and later coastal specialisation, the Mini-athiliya individuals provide evidence for a plastic spectrum of ecological adaptation. We argue for continued research on how human populations in different parts of the island interacted and adapted to its diverse tropical settings across space and time.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".