One step further in biomechanical models in palaeontology: a nonlinear finite element analysis review.

Finite element analysis (FEA) is no longer a new technique in the fields of palaeontology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. It is nowadays a well-established technique within the virtual functional-morphology toolkit. However, almost all the works published in these fields have only applied the most basic FEA tools i.e., linear materials in static structural problems. Linear and static approximations are commonly used because they are computationally less expensive, and the error associated with these assumptions can be accepted. Nonetheless, nonlinearities are natural to be used in biomechanical models especially when modelling soft tissues, establish contacts between separated bones or the inclusion of buckling results. The aim of this review is to, firstly, highlight the usefulness of non-linearities and secondly, showcase these FEA tool to researchers that work in functional morphology and biomechanics, as non-linearities can improve their FEA models by widening the possible applications and topics that currently are not used in palaeontology and anthropology.

Franz Tappeiner (1816-1902) and his pioneering studies on tuberculosis.

Franz Tappeiner (1816-1902) was an Austrian scientist: physician and anthropologist. He studied medicine at the universities of Prague and Padua, and completed his medical education receiving his doctorate in 1843 in Vienna. Tappeiner investigated the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis in animal models and he dealt with public health, in particular Merano's welfare and public health regulations. In 1877, in the Anatomical and Pathological Institute of Munich led by the German pathologist Ludwig von Buhl (1816-1880), Tappeiner studied the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis in animal models, by exposing dogs to sputum of phthisic patients affected by this disease. He was able to show that phthisis and tuberculosis were the same disease, which could be spread through inhalation. These studies were pioneering and preceded by 10 years the discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus by Robert Koch (1843-1910) in 1882. The research activities of Tappeiner were focal in tracking the future path for Koch's discovery and represent milestones in the history of tuberculosis.

Strontium and oxygen isotopes to trace mobility routes during the Bell Beaker period in the north of Spain.

Strontium and oxygen isotopes of individuals from El Hundido and Valdescusa (north of Spain) sites, corresponding to the Bell Beaker culture, were analysed in order to determine mobility patterns and provenance areas. Strontium and oxygen isotope ratios in three teeth from two individuals at El Hundido and two teeth from the five individuals at Valdescusa were studied. The analyses were performed in both dentine and enamel fractions. 87Sr/86Sr ratios of El Hundido individuals indicate one was of foreign origin and the other was local whereas at Valdescusa were all of foreign provenance. Calculated δ18Ow values of El Hundido suggest a provenance from the geographical area close to the site while the Valdescusa would come from a warmer region. The comparison of oxygen and strontium isotope signatures indicate the west of the Iberian Peninsula (Zamora or the east of Leon regions) as the provenance area for the foreign individual at El Hundido and southwest France (Garonne basin) as the region of provenance for the Valdescusa.

Populations comparison and assessment of Gaya-Sancho regression formulas for sex estimation based on sacrum / Comparación de poblaciones y evaluación de las fórmulas de regresión de Gaya-Sancho para la estimación del sexo en base al sacro

Introduction: The effectiveness that some methodologies offer is analysed when they are applied to estimate sex in individuals from a geographical environment other than the population from which the formulas were obtained. Objective: To assess the method of Gaya-Sancho applying their regression formulas and comparing modern skeletal collections of the same chronological context. Materials and methods: By means of some metrical variables of the sacrum, the degree of sexual dimorphism of a modern series from Granada is compared with another modern series from Granada and a modern series from Canada. Results: Despite the similarities between the series, the results range from 56.25% to 59.52% in males and from 77.27% to 91.67% in females from Órgiva and from 83.78% to 89.19% in males and from 64.29% to 69.23% in females from Grant. Discussion: These results showed that the difference in series could be influenced by many factors as some authors stated despite the similar geographical context. Conclusions: These results suggest that the regression formulas can be an acceptable method to estimate sex and the existence of differences between the analysed series. (AU)

Introducción: La efectividad de algunos métodos de estimación del sexo se evalúa cuando dichas metodologías se aplican en muestras de distinto contexto geográfico del que es la muestra que origina el método. Objetivo: Evaluar el método de fórmulas de regresión de Gaya-Sancho para la estimación del sexo aplicando dicho método y comparando dos series del mimo contexto temporal. Materiales y métodos: Mediante las medias de algunas variables métricas del sacro, se evaluó el grado de dimorfismo sexual de una colección osteológica contemporánea de Granada comparándola con otras series contemporáneas: una del mismo contexto geográfico (Granada) y otra perteneciente a la colección de Grant (Canadá). Resultados: A pesar de las similitudes encontradas entre las colecciones, los resultados aportan un rango de 56,26 a 59,52% en hombre y de un 77,27 a un 91,67% en mujeres para la serie de Órgiva (Granada); y de un 83,78 al 89,19% en hombre y del 64,29 al 69,23% en mujeres pertenecientes a la colección de Grant (Canadá). Discusión: Estos resultados muestran que la diferencia entre series podría verse afectada por diversos factores como muestran algunos autores pese a la similitud de contexto geográfico. Conclusión: Estos resultados sugieren que las fórmulas de regresión podrían ser utilizadas como un método aceptable para la estimación del sexo además de mostrar existencia de diferencias entre las colecciones analizadas. (AU)

Environmental implications and evidence of natural products from dental calculi of a Neolithic-Chalcolithic community (central Italy).

In this contribution, we investigated the role of plants in the prehistoric community of Casale del Dolce (Anagni, FR, central Italy), through microparticles recovered from dental calculus. The finding of a great amount of pollen types, even in form of compact lumps, could indicate use of natural substances, such as honeybee products and/or conifer resins. This plant-microremain record also suggested environmental implications relative to the Neolithic and Chalcolithic period. Additionally, the stability of the tartar microenvironment had preserved starches and other microparticles, such as one epidermal trichome, a sporangium, and fragments of plant tissue, rarely detected in ancient dental calculus. The detection of secondary metabolites in the ancient matrix confirmed the familiarity of this community with plant resources. All these data supply various interesting food for thought and expand the knowledge about the potential of dental calculus in archaeological and archaeobotanical fields with a special focus on palaeoecology.

Anthropocentric biases in teleological thinking: How nature seems designed for humans.

People frequently see design in nature that reflects intuitive teleological thinking-that is, the order in nature that supports life suggests it was designed for that purpose. This research proposes that inferences are stronger when nature supports human life specifically. Five studies (N = 1,788) examine evidence for an anthro-teleological bias. People agreed more with design statements framed to aid humans (e.g., "Trees produce oxygen so that humans can breathe") than the same statements framed to aid other targets (e.g., "Trees produce oxygen so that leopards can breathe"). The bias was greatest when advantages for humans were well-known and salient (e.g., the ozone layer) and decreased when advantages for other targets were made explicit. The bias was not eliminated by highlighting the benefits for other species, however, and emerged spontaneously for novel phenomena ("Jupiter's gravity protects Earth from asteroids"). We conclude that anthropocentric biases enhance existing teleological biases to see stronger design in phenomena where it enables human survival. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Field methods and strategies for assessing female reproductive functioning.

A detailed understanding of female reproductive functioning is important to many disciplines including anthropology, evolutionary theory, demography, psychology, and biomedicine. In this article, I describe strategies and methods that have been used successfully in community-based studies of human reproduction, many in remote locales, to produce high quality biomarker data. These techniques are applicable to a wide range of research questions and populations, and to persons from adolescence through senescence. I give particular attention to the inherent challenges imposed by the cyclical and somewhat unpredictable nature of the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis including the necessity and difficulty of ascertaining the timing and occurrence of ovulation, the limits of different sampling regimes for capturing fluctuations in reproductive hormones, and the critical importance of recognizing and, when possible, reducing selection bias. I discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of collecting saliva, urine, and dried blood spots, and describe some of the subtleties involved in collecting contamination-free samples. Once samples are collected, they must be stored in a manner that minimizes degradation; I describe techniques to keep samples cold even without access to electricity or dry ice. I also discuss various issues that should be considered during initial discussions with a laboratory and when samples are assayed by the laboratory. I include examples of techniques that have worked well in actual field studies, and examples of flawed analytical approaches that should be avoided. With these and other tools, even under technology-sparse conditions, researchers can investigate variability in human physiology across the breadth of human habitats.

Three Phases of Ancient Migration Shaped the Ancestry of Human Populations in Vanuatu.

The archipelago of Vanuatu has been at the crossroads of human population movements in the Pacific for the past three millennia. To help address several open questions regarding the history of these movements, we generated genome-wide data for 11 ancient individuals from the island of Efate dating from its earliest settlement to the recent past, including five associated with the Chief Roi Mata's Domain World Heritage Area, and analyzed them in conjunction with 34 published ancient individuals from Vanuatu and elsewhere in Oceania, as well as present-day populations. Our results outline three distinct periods of population transformations. First, the four earliest individuals, from the Lapita-period site of Teouma, are concordant with eight previously described Lapita-associated individuals from Vanuatu and Tonga in having almost all of their ancestry from a "First Remote Oceanian" source related to East and Southeast Asians. Second, both the Papuan ancestry predominating in Vanuatu for the past 2,500 years and the smaller component of Papuan ancestry found in Polynesians can be modeled as deriving from a single source most likely originating in New Britain, suggesting that the movement of people carrying this ancestry to Remote Oceania closely followed that of the First Remote Oceanians in time and space. Third, the Chief Roi Mata's Domain individuals descend from a mixture of Vanuatu- and Polynesian-derived ancestry and are related to Polynesian-influenced communities today in central, but not southern, Vanuatu, demonstrating Polynesian genetic input in multiple groups with independent histories.

Evolution of the mental model: From archaic myths to modern myths.

In an era marked by accelerating change and destabilisation of many structures and regularities in almost all domains, it becomes crucial to understand the source and nature of the unfolding crises and their relation to social dynamics. In this paper the evolution of social dynamics is investigated not on the basis of observable structures, but the mental model of human agents, that is, how they both perceive and conceive of the world and their relation to it. For this purpose, the paper reaches out to Ancient Mesopotamia, where the oldest written documents provide evidence about the evolution of the mental model as it has been preserved in the form of myths. Some key notions filtered out from some important myths are used to analyse the interaction between the mental model and social dynamics. Finally, some criteria and directions are suggested for the present-day crises.

Maximum genetic proportion of metric traits from different regions of the skull in ancient humanpopulations of Northwestern Argentina

In order to explain the evolutionary process of ancient human populations that inhabited a specific geographical region from quantitative skull traits, it is advisable to know the evolutionary potential of metric characters. For this reason, the proportion of the maximum genetic variance or maximum heritability (h2m) of the variables studied was estimated. In addition, it was evaluated whether h2m changes between regions of the skull (face, base and vault) and the degree of association between the phenotypic variance and the maximum genetic variance. Twenty-one symmetrical variables on the left and right sides of the skull were measured in 245 skulls from five prehistoric samples from northwestern Argentina. The upper limit of heritability was estimated using the repeated measurement method. To test whether there are differences between the h2m of each group, the Kruskal-Wallis test was used. The maximum genetic values of each variable were obtained through a regression analysis (right measure on left measure). The relationship between phenotypic and maxi-mum genetic values was evaluated by correlation analysis. Significant bilateral difference is demon-strated in six of 21 characters. The average h2m is 0.77 and ranges between 0.58 and 0.93. The aver-age correlation between phenotypic values and maximum genotypic values was 0.8 (R2=0.65), suggesting that it is possible to make inferences of the genetic structure of the population from phenotypic information. The high proportion of maximum observed genetic variance indicates an important evolutionary potential of the craniofacial complex in ancient populations of northwestern Argentina

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Applications of Bayesian Skyline Plots and Approximate Bayesian Computation for Human Demography.

Bayesian methods have been adopted by anthropologists for their utility in resolving complex questions about human history based on genetic data. The main advantages of Bayesian methods include simple model comparison, presenting results as a summary of probability distributions, and the explicit inclusion of prior information into analyses. In the field of anthropological genetics, for example, implementing Bayesian skyline plots and approximate Bayesian computation is becoming ubiquitous as means to analyze genetic data for the purpose of demographic or historic inference. Correspondingly, there is a critical need for better understanding of the underlying assumptions, proper applications, and limitations of these two methods by the larger anthropological community. Here we review Bayesian skyline plots and approximate Bayesian computation as applied to human demography and provide examples of the application of these methods to anthropological research questions. We also review the two core components of Bayesian demographic analysis: the coalescent and Bayesian inference. Our goal is to describe their basic mechanics in an attempt to demystify them.

The mitogenome portrait of Umbria in Central Italy as depicted by contemporary inhabitants and pre-Roman remains.

Umbria is located in Central Italy and took the name from its ancient inhabitants, the Umbri, whose origins are still debated. Here, we investigated the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation of 545 present-day Umbrians (with 198 entire mitogenomes) and 28 pre-Roman individuals (obtaining 19 ancient mtDNAs) excavated from the necropolis of Plestia. We found a rather homogeneous distribution of western Eurasian lineages across the region, with few notable exceptions. Contemporary inhabitants of the eastern part, delimited by the Tiber River and the Apennine Mountains, manifest a peculiar mitochondrial proximity to central-eastern Europeans, mainly due to haplogroups U4 and U5a, and an overrepresentation of J (30%) similar to the pre-Roman remains, also excavated in East Umbria. Local genetic continuities are further attested to by six terminal branches (H1e1, J1c3, J2b1, U2e2a, U8b1b1 and K1a4a) shared between ancient and modern mitogenomes. Eventually, we identified multiple inputs from various population sources that likely shaped the mitochondrial gene pool of ancient Umbri over time, since early Neolithic, including gene flows with central-eastern Europe. This diachronic mtDNA portrait of Umbria fits well with the genome-wide population structure identified on the entire peninsula and with historical sources that list the Umbri among the most ancient Italic populations.

A Paleogenomic Reconstruction of the Deep Population History of the Andes.

There are many unanswered questions about the population history of the Central and South Central Andes, particularly regarding the impact of large-scale societies, such as the Moche, Wari, Tiwanaku, and Inca. We assembled genome-wide data on 89 individuals dating from ∼9,000-500 years ago (BP), with a particular focus on the period of the rise and fall of state societies. Today's genetic structure began to develop by 5,800 BP, followed by bi-directional gene flow between the North and South Highlands, and between the Highlands and Coast. We detect minimal admixture among neighboring groups between ∼2,000-500 BP, although we do detect cosmopolitanism (people of diverse ancestries living side-by-side) in the heartlands of the Tiwanaku and Inca polities. We also highlight cases of long-range mobility connecting the Andes to Argentina and the Northwest Andes to the Amazon Basin. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Comunicación en terapia ocupacional / Communication in occupational therapy

En la siguiente recesión se presenta un artículo del antropólogo Gregory Bateson, que pretende mostrar cuán importante es tanto la modalidad del tratamiento como la capacidad de comunicación del profesional para incidir de manera positiva en el cambio intrínseco de la persona. A través de su lectura se pueden extraer otras reflexiones como son la identidad de la profesión, el nacimiento de la misma y su contexto, los paradigmas a lo largo de su historia, todos los cambios acontecido y sus causas y sobre todo el momento en el que estamos y hacia donde queremos dirigirnos sin perder la esencia de la terapia ocupacional, lo que nos diferencia del resto de profesionales, en vez de acercarnos cada vez más a ellos

In the following critical review, an opinion article by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, which aims to show how important is both the treatment modality and the professional's ability to communicate in a positive way in the intrinsic change of the person. Through its reading, other reflections can be detected, such as the identity of the profession, the birth of the profession and its context, the paradigms throughout its history, all the changes that have occurred and its causes and, above all, the moment in which that we are and where we are heading without losing the essence of occupational therapy, which differentiates us from other professionals, instead of getting closer and closer to them

Ultra close-range digital photogrammetry in skeletal anthropology: A systematic review.

BACKGROUND: Ultra close-range digital photogrammetry (UCR-DP) is emerging as a robust technique for 3D model generation and represents a convenient and low-cost solution for rapid data acquisition in virtual anthropology. OBJECTIVES: This systematic review aims to analyse applications, technical implementation, and performance of UCR-DP in skeletal anthropology. METHODS: The PRISMA guidelines were applied to the study. The bibliographic search was performed on March 1st, 2019 using Scopus and MEDLINE databases to retrieve peer-reviewed studies accessible in English full-text. The authors worked independently to select the articles meeting inclusion criteria, upon discussion. Studies underwent to quantitative and qualitative syntheses. RESULTS: Twenty-six studies were selected. The majority appeared in 2016 or after and were focused on methodological aspects; the applications mainly dealt with the documentation of skeletal findings and the identification or comparison of anatomical features and trauma. Most authors used commercial software packages, and an offline approach. Research is still quite heterogeneous concerning methods, terminology and quality of results, and proper validation is still lacking. CONCLUSIONS: UCR-DP has great potential in skeletal anthropology, with many significant advantages: versatility in terms of application range and technical implementation, scalability, and photorealistic restitution. Validation of the technique, and the application of the cloud-based approach, with its reduced requirements relating to hardware, labour, time, and cost, could further facilitate the sharing of large collections for research and communication purposes.