Pubertal timing as an indicator of early life stress in <scp>Roman Italy</scp> and <scp>Roman Gaul</scp>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objectives Puberty is a period of rapid growth and development, and the age of onset and duration of puberty may serve as an indicator of developmental stress during childhood. In this study, we compare pubertal timing and tempo in individuals from two Roman Imperial cemetery sites, integrating biological and social factors to better understand pubertal timing differences and their possible connection to Early Life Stress (ELS) and peri‐pubertal stress. Materials and Methods Osteological methods to estimate pubertal timing were applied to 264 individuals from Lisieux‐Michelet (4th–5th centuries CE; France) and Isola Sacra (1st–4th centuries CE; Italy). Peptide analysis of tooth enamel was used to assess sex in a sub‐sample of pre‐pubertal remains. Results Individuals experienced puberty between 9 and 20 years of age, with females experiencing the acceleration stage earlier than males ( p < 0.05, g > 1.2). Between the two sites, no significant differences were noted for age‐at‐death during acceleration, peak height velocity, and deceleration (i.e., the active stages of puberty). Menarche occurred around 15 years of age. Discussion The inter‐site comparisons demonstrate similar patterns of pubertal timing and tempo. For males, the pubertal timing aligns with ancient literary descriptions of key puberty milestones. Females entered puberty earlier than literary sources suggest and experienced puberty for an extended period, pointing to possible gendered exposure to ELS and peri‐pubertal stress, influenced by their social status in the Roman Empire. These results demonstrate how pubertal timing and tempo can be used to infer developmental stress in past populations.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".