The spread of thalassemia among prehistoric populations of the Mediterranean Basin has been linked to the increased risk to early agriculturalists posed by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. The diagnosis of the disease in human skeletal remains, however, has usually been based on a single pathological criterion, porotic hyperostosis. This paper reports on what we believe to be the earliest case of thalassemia yet identified in the prehistoric record. Our diagnosis of the disease in an individual from the submerged Prepottery Neolithic B village of Atlit-Yam off the Israeli coast is based on a pathological humerus demonstrating a pattern of deformation characteristic of clinical thalassemia. The implications of these findings for our understanding of human societies undergoing the transition from foraging to agriculture in the Near East are discussed.
The present study describes the skeletal material that was uncovered at the crypt of the monastery of St Euthymius at Khan-el-Ahmar, in the Judean Desert, near Jerusalem.Comparative morphometric analysis with contemporaneous populations and the palaeodemographic and palaeopathological data disprove many historians' well accepted notions regarding early Christians in the Judean Desert. In the present paper we suggest that the majority of people who were buried at the Khan-el-Ahmar monastery derived mainly from the autochthonous population of the region and were not migrants or fugitives from surrounding countries. It appears that this community of monks lived in a rather protected environment despite their desert surroundings. In the monastery, they maintained a high level of personal hygiene, had adequate food supplies and were not subjected to repeated acts of violence from their neighbours.
The directional and fluctuating asymmetry characteristics of the human skull with reference to demographic and genetic parameters are presented. In addition, the discriminatory ability (in sex, age, and tribal origin) of asymmetry variables was evaluated against a battery of conventional metric measures. Regarding directional asymmetry (DA), the results show that the calvarium exhibits a clear right-sided "excess" and the basal region a left-sided "excess." The DA of traits of the face appears ambiguous. Age and sex evidently have no bearing on DA, whereas tribal origin does. In fluctuating asymmetry (FA), the effect of age is negligible; sex is a factor, albeit to a minor extent. The facial region manifests the highest mean FA value and the calvarium the lowest. The more a skull deviates metrically from the population mean, the higher the mean FA value. FA and DA measures show a relatively low intercorrelation (<0.20). Comparison of the discriminatory ability (F = 1, F = 4) of asymmetry vs. metric measures shows that the former are better classifiers of tribal affiliation, whereas the latter discriminate better between the sexes.
A set of 31 nonconventional paired cranial measurements, as well as six conventional nonpaired measures, were taken on 266 skulls, representing two related populations: Bedouins of the Israeli Negev Desert and Bedouins of the Sinai. The data were subjected to univariate and discriminant analyses to determine the relative efficacy of paired vs. conventional measures in sorting individuals according to tribal and sex affiliation. It was found that paired measures have greater discriminatory power (87%) than conventional ones (47%) in terms of classifying individuals belonging to human isolates derived from a common ancestor and sharing similar environmental conditions. This greater discrimination attests to the value of the level of "developmental noise" (a measure provided by fluctuating asymmetry) in sorting human populations. Possible explanations are proffered for the above finding.
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