Female bone physiology resilience in a past Polynesian Outlier community

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23171-3. This is version 3 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Justyna Jolanta Miszkiewicz, Hallie R. Buckley, Michal Feldman, Selina Carlhoff, Kathrin Naegele, Emilie Bertolini, Nathalia R. Dias Guimarães, Meg M. Walker, Lawrence Kiko, Adam Powell

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.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/d4nps

Subjects

Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Arts and Humanities, Biological and Physical Anthropology, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Other Arts and Humanities, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures, Pacific Islands Languages and Societies, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

bone remodelling, Haversian, histomorphometry, Melanesia, osteon, Pacific, vascularity

Dates

Published: 2022-02-28 08:02

Last Updated: 2023-03-02 09:39

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License

CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International