Nonsemantic word graphs of texts spanning ∼ 4500 years, including pre-literate Amerindian oral narratives.

Non-semantic word graphs obtained from oral reports are useful to describe cognitive decline in psychiatric conditions such as Schizophrenia, as well as education-related gains in discourse structure during typical development. Here we provide non-semantic word graph attributes of texts spanning approximately 4500 years of history, and pre-literate Amerindian oral narratives. The dataset assessed comprises 707 literary texts representative of 9 different Afro-Eurasian traditions (Syro-Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hinduist, Persian, Judeo-Christian, Greek-Roman, Medieval, Modern and Contemporary), and Amerindian narratives (N = 39) obtained from a single ethnic group from South America (Kalapalo, N = 18), or from a mixed ethnic group from South, Central and North America (non-Kalapalo, N = 21). The present article provides detailed information about each text or narrative, including measurements of four graph attributes of interest: number of nodes (lexical diversity), repeated edges (short-range recurrence), largest strongly connected component (long-range recurrence), and average shortest path (graph length).

The History of Writing Reflects the Effects of Education on Discourse Structure: Implications for Literacy, Orality, Psychosis and the Axial Age.

BACKGROUND: Graph analysis detects psychosis and literacy acquisition. Bronze Age literature has been proposed to contain childish or psychotic features, which would only have matured during the Axial Age (∼800-200 BC), a putative boundary for contemporary mentality. METHOD: Graph analysis of literary texts spanning ∼4,500 years shows remarkable asymptotic changes over time. RESULTS: While lexical diversity, long-range recurrence and graph length increase away from randomness, short-range recurrence declines towards random levels. Bronze Age texts are structurally similar to oral reports from literate typical children and literate psychotic adults, but distinct from poetry, and from narratives by preliterate preschoolers or Amerindians. Text structure reconstitutes the "arrow-of-time", converging to educated adult levels at the Axial Age onset. CONCLUSION: The educational pathways of oral and literate traditions are structurally divergent, with a decreasing range of recurrence in the former, and an increasing range of recurrence in the latter. Education is seemingly the driving force underlying discourse maturation.

Taenia sp. in human burial from Kan River, East Siberia

We present an arhaeoparasitological analysis of a unique burial from the Neftprovod II burial ground in East Siberia, which dated from the Bronze Age. Analysis of a sediment sample from the sacral region of the pelvis revealed the presence of Taenia sp. eggs. Because uncooked animal tissue is the primary source of Taenia, this indicated that the individual was likely consuming raw or undercooked meat of roe deer, red deer, or elk infected with Taenia. This finding represents the oldest case of a human infected with Taenia sp. from Eastern Siberia and Russia.