Winter sources of ascorbic acid for Pleistocene hominins in northern Eurasia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Hominins emerging from Africa in the Pleistocene required sources of vitamins in addition to sources of energy and substance (carbohydrates, proteins and fats). Most of their vitamin requirements could be provided by eating the flesh of herbivores but vitamin C is in low concentrations in animal muscle tissue. Lack of vitamin C causes fatal disease of scurvy. In southern Eurasia hominins would have been able to harvest fruits and vegetables throughout the year but as they migrated further to the north, they would encounter regions in which no plants were growing in mid-winter. Vitamin C is enriched in organ meats but their mass was probably too low for adequate provision. Storage of summer crops of fruit was possible. Hominins could however fulfil ascorbic acid requirements by drinking aqueous extracts from the needles of pines and other conifers which contain adequate amounts of vitamin C to satisfy human needs. We show evidence of pine needle and related consumption in Paleolithic sites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".