Paleodemographic analysis of age at death for a population of Black Sea Scythians: An exploration by using Bayesian methods

Paleodemography: From archaeology and skeletal age estimation to life in the past

Much of paleodemography, an interdisciplinary field with strong ties to archaeology, among other disciplines, is oriented toward clarifying the life experiences of past people and why they changed over time. We focus on how human skeletons contribute to our understanding of preindustrial demographic regimes, including when changes took place that led to the world as we know it today. Problems with existing paleodemographic practices are highlighted, as are promising directions for future work. The latter requires both better age estimates and innovative methods to handle data appropriately. Age-at-death estimates for adult skeletons are a particular problem, especially for adults over 50 years that undoubtedly are mistakenly underrepresented in published studies of archaeological skeletons. Better age estimates for the entirety of the lifespan are essential to generate realistic distributions of age at death. There are currently encouraging signs that after about a half-century of intensive, and sometimes contentious, research, paleodemography is poised to contribute much to understandings of evolutionary processes, the structure of past populations, and human-disease interaction, among other topics.

Twenty-first century bioarchaeology: Taking stock and moving forward

This article presents outcomes from a Workshop entitled "Bioarchaeology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward," which was held at Arizona State University (ASU) on March 6-8, 2020. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (ASU), and the Center for Bioarchaeological Research (CBR, ASU), the Workshop's overall goal was to explore reasons why research proposals submitted by bioarchaeologists, both graduate students and established scholars, fared disproportionately poorly within recent NSF Anthropology Program competitions and to offer advice for increasing success. Therefore, this Workshop comprised 43 international scholars and four advanced graduate students with a history of successful grant acquisition, primarily from the United States. Ultimately, we focused on two related aims: (1) best practices for improving research designs and training and (2) evaluating topics of contemporary significance that reverberate through history and beyond as promising trajectories for bioarchaeological research. Among the former were contextual grounding, research question/hypothesis generation, statistical procedures appropriate for small samples and mixed qualitative/quantitative data, the salience of Bayesian methods, and training program content. Topical foci included ethics, social inequality, identity (including intersectionality), climate change, migration, violence, epidemic disease, adaptability/plasticity, the osteological paradox, and the developmental origins of health and disease. Given the profound changes required globally to address decolonization in the 21st century, this concern also entered many formal and informal discussions.

Plant-Based Support of Respiratory Health during Viral Outbreaks

Respiratory viruses are linked to major epidemic events that have plagued humans through recorded history and possibly much earlier, ranging from common colds, influenza, and coronavirus infections to measles. However, difficulty in developing effective pharmaceutical solutions to treat infected individuals has hindered efforts to manage and minimize respiratory viral outbreaks and the associated mortality. Here we highlight a series of botanical interventions with different and often overlapping putative mechanisms of action to support the respiratory system, for which the bioactive pharmacophore was suggested and the initial structure-activity relationships have been explored (Bupleurum spp., Glycyrrhiza spp., Andrographis spp.), have been proposed with uncertainty (Echinacea spp., Zingiber spp., Verbascum spp., Marrubium spp.), or remained to be elucidated (Sambucus spp., Urtica spp.). Investigating these metabolites and their botanical sources holds potential to uncover new mediators of the respiratory health outcomes as well as molecular targets for future break-through therapeutic interventions targeting respiratory viral outbreaks.