Bodies, diet, disease and landscape — osteology, palaeopathology and isotope evidence for what people ate and where from.
8 topics · 8 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Ancient Skeletal Evidence for Leprosy in India (2000 B.C.)
Robbins et al. · 2009
A lesion-by-lesion diagnosis of a skeleton from Balathal pushes the earliest confirmed evidence of leprosy back a thousand years, and argues the…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Cultural Responses to Climate Change During the Late Holocene
Peter B. deMenocal · 2001
Reads marine dust and lake-sediment records alongside archaeological collapse horizons to argue that abrupt Late Holocene aridification episodes, not…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains
Jane E. Buikstra & Douglas H. Ubelaker · 1994
Sets out a single standardised protocol for recording age, sex, stature and pathology from human skeletal remains, so bioarchaeological reports…
+2 more at this level
8 works
Robbins et al.
A lesion-by-lesion diagnosis of a skeleton from Balathal pushes the earliest confirmed evidence of leprosy back a thousand years, and argues the disease reached South Asia before its supposed spread from Africa.
8 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Peter B. deMenocal
Reads marine dust and lake-sediment records alongside archaeological collapse horizons to argue that abrupt Late Holocene aridification episodes, not political failure alone, ended the Akkadian Empire and disrupted Classic Maya society.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Megan Brickley & Jacqueline I. McKinley
Sets a single UK professional standard for recording age, sex, pathology and taphonomy from excavated human remains, arguing that comparable data across excavators and decades depends on everyone recording the same set of observations in the same way.
Michael P. Richards & Erik Trinkaus
Compiles collagen stable-isotope values across Neanderthal and early Upper Palaeolithic skeletons to argue Neanderthals fed almost entirely as terrestrial carnivores, while early modern humans drew on a markedly wider diet that included aquatic resources.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frantz et al.
Combines ancient dog and wolf genomes with the archaeological record to argue that dogs were domesticated twice independently, in Europe and in Asia, and that one of those populations later spread and replaced the other.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jane E. Buikstra & Douglas H. Ubelaker
Sets out a single standardised protocol for recording age, sex, stature and pathology from human skeletal remains, so bioarchaeological reports written from different excavations can be compared on the same terms.
Dorian Q. Fuller et al.
Compares archaeobotanical domestication timelines across cereals and legumes on three continents to argue that the slow, non-deliberate loss of shattering seed pods was a repeated, convergent process rather than a single deliberate invention of farming.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Haak et al.
Sequences genome-wide ancient DNA from prehistoric skeletons to argue that a large migration from the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 4,500 years ago reshaped the ancestry of Central and Northern Europe, a finding since invoked to support a steppe origin for Indo-European languages.
link checked 17 Sept 2026