Figure 1.
Schematic illustration of the bone turnover process.
The value for bone collagen at the unit time age of
years is represented as
.
Figure 2.
Estimated temporal changes in bone mineral and collagen turnover rates.
Turnover rates of bone minerals and collagen are represented as discrete values, and that of collagen is fitted to QP plotted against age.
Table 1.
Estimated temporal changes in turnover rates for bone minerals and collagen.
Table 2.
Summary of MDEs for the archaeological populations calculated using the developed model.
Figure 3.
Relationships between MDEs and the logarithms of the probabilities of the four weaning parameters for the archaeological populations.
Dotted lines indicate the thresholds of probability. (A) and (B) The age at the start and end of weaning, respectively. (C) -enrichment from maternal to infant tissue. (D) The difference between the
value of collagen synthesized entirely from weaning foods and the mean
value for all adults. A regression line is also shown for
(slope = −0.514, intercept = −3.403).
Figure 4.
Histograms for the MDE distributions of the four weaning parameters for the archaeological populations.
See Figure 3 for the meanings of the labels.
Figure 5.
Maximum density weaning ages plotted by the midpoint time period for the populations.
Table 3.
Mean and SDs of MDEs for the archaeological populations by the type of subsistence.
Figure 6.
Boxplots for the weaning ages estimated in this study and observed in previous ethnographic studies.
Data were obtained from Barry and Paxson (1971): [88], Ford (1964): [7], and Sellen (2001): [89].
Table 4.
Summary of ages at the start and end of weaning found in previous studies of ethnographic populations.
Figure 7.
Schematic illustration of the terminology used for the subadult diet.
The ages at the start and end of weaning are represented as and
, respectively.