Female bone physiology resilience in a past Polynesian Outlier community
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Buckley, Hallie R
Feldman, Michal
Kiko, Lawrence
Carlhoff, Selina
Naegele, Kathrin
Bertolini, Emilie
Guimaraes, Nathalia R Dias
Walker, Meg M
Powell, Adam
Posth, Cosimo
Kinaston, Rebecca L
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Abstract
Remodelling is a fundamental biological process involved in the maintenance of bone physiology and function. We know that a range of health and lifestyle factors can impact this process in living and past societies, but there is a notable gap in bone remodelling data for populations from the Pacific Islands. We conducted the first examination of femoral cortical histology in 69 individuals from ca. 440–150 BP Taumako in Solomon Islands, a remote ‘Polynesian Outlier’ island in Melanesia. We tested whether bone remodelling indicators differed between age groups, and biological sex validated using ancient DNA. Bone vascular canal and osteon size, vascular porosity, and localised osteon densities, corrected by femoral robusticity indices were examined. Females had statistically significantly higher vascular porosities when compared to males, but osteon densities and ratios of canal-osteon (~ 8%) did not differ between the sexes. Our results indicate that, compared to males, localised femoral bone tissue of the Taumako females did not drastically decline with age, contrary to what is often observed in modern populations. However, our results match findings in other archaeological samples—a testament to past female bone physiology resilience, also now observed in the Pacific region.
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Scientific Reports
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12
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© The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Anthropology
Archaeology
Science & Technology
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Science & Technology - Other Topics
BRIEF COMMUNICATION
SECONDARY OSTEON
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Miszkiewicz, JJ; Buckley, HR; Feldman, M; Kiko, L; Carlhoff, S; Naegele, K; Bertolini, E; Guimaraes, NRD; Walker, MM; Powell, A; Posth, C; Kinaston, RL, Female bone physiology resilience in a past Polynesian Outlier community, Scientific Reports, 2022, 12, pp. 18857