PONE-D-22-19889Deciduous dental pathology and wear among sex determined Early Bronze-Age children from Franzhausen I, Lower AustriaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kanz,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The manuscript by Bas and coauthors presents and discusses some oral pathologies in a sample of individuals aged inferiors to 12 years from a Bronze Age necropolis in Austria.

The odontoskeletal sample was the subject of previous morphological analysis, and for the same individuals presented in the manuscript, sex was diagnosed by proteomic analysis of dental enamel and already published in a previous article.

Thus, this paper aims to present the prevalence (but see reviewer's comments 2) of some oral diseases divided by sex.

The manuscript has probably already been submitted to another journal, as is evident from the structure of the abstract and improper bibliographic formatting. In addition, the authors failed to put either page numbers or line numbers in the manuscript, thus making the reviewers' work more difficult.

The two reviewers made substantial criticisms that need to be considered by the authors, especially at the level of comparison with more recent populations.

In general, the authors tend present data of interest but reach conclusions that are sometimes speculative and not well supported by the results.

What emerges from the manuscript is that there is no significant difference in dental disease and wear between male and female infants and children and that patterns of wear and caries differ from those in later populations. Discussion and conclusion instead are complex and seldom provide interpretations that are not supported by clear and indisputable trends in the data .

Particularly speculative are the conclusions regarding the differential onset of weaning between males and females, and generally the topic of weaning is treated too easily and without an accurate understanding (see Humphrey 2014) of the complexity of the phenomenon, which in any case cannot be approached in terms of dental wear.

To these general criticisms there are other problems in the manuscript that need to be addressed by the authors:

1. “Many of these deaths were likely due to accidents or rapid infections and not chronic disorders, so the sample is generally representative of children within the community.”

As stressed by reviewer 1 this sentence has no support in the manuscript. In general the mortality nature of the sample is not enough discussed by the authors.

1. Linear enamel hypoplasia (which is rare and insignificant in the sample) is the outcome of other pathological of physiological processes during development and shouldn’t in my opinion clustered among oral pathologies.

1. “Contrary to a prior publication (38), linear enamel hypoplasia could be observed in only 5 of the 75 children, a prevalence of about 7 % (95 % CI between 2 % and 15 %).” It is necessary to explain why the two analyses on the same dental series can produce different results. What was the percent of LEH in 38?

1. “When plotted with error bars for age estimation uncertainty and a loess curve to illustrate the general trend, we observe that the variation in dentine exposure between individuals of a similar age is not entirely explained by age estimation uncertainty for all four molars”. I think that the use of lowess (and not loess) smoothing regression is not correct in this analysis and do not add any information about the correlation between age at death and dentine exposure. Moreover lowess curves should be plotted with the confidence interval of the locally weighted polynomial regression fit. I suggest the authors to use linear (maybe robust) regression models.

1. “Based on existing literature, the people buried at Franzhausen I likely began weaning their children before the age of two but a little later than in industrialized populations (75, 76)” this sentence is misleading and wrongly suggests that Humphrey and/or Sellen eventually discussed data about Franzhausen. The onset of weaning is physiologically necessary before one year of age and this well known and discussed by a large literature.
2. “Lipid analysis carried out on small ceramic vessels used for infant feeding from the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age in the region confirmed that they contained animal milk (77)” The presence of milk in ceramic vessel for feeding infants DO NOT imply they were weaned. The authors are here confusing the onset of weaning with the use of non human milk in nursing infants. The onset of weaning foresees the introduction of non milk (possibly soft and processed) food into the infant diet.

1. “the observation that the upper and lower dm1 wear appears to start wearing shortly after eruption confirms that weaning had indeed begun by at least 2 years old.” This sentence offers no clues on the nursing in Franzhausen as the onset of weaning before 2 years old is a practice not only well known for all humans (including neanderthals).

1. Variations in dental wear between male and female children are minor, but there is a slightly higher rate of dentine exposure among younger female children, especially on the lower molars. More wear accumulating on the teeth that erupt first could be explained by differences in diet during early childhood between male and female children, with female children consuming a more abrasive diet (including more abrasives likely found in ground cereals and/or requiring more chewing); alternatively, the weaning process might have started earlier for female children with solid foods being introduced earlier on.” The difference between sexes for dentine exposure il limited to the second lower molar (Ldm2 p = 0.008). But Ldm2s are in occlusion after age 2. Therefore, this unique and not extraordinary evidence tells nothing about differential onset of weaning.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 19 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Luca Bondioli, M.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf.

2. In your manuscript, please provide additional information regarding the specimens used in your study. Ensure that you have reported specimen numbers and complete repository information, including museum name and geographic location. 

If permits were required, please ensure that you have provided details for all permits that were obtained, including the full name of the issuing authority, and add the following statement:

'All necessary permits were obtained for the described study, which complied with all relevant regulations.'

If no permits were required, please include the following statement:

'No permits were required for the described study, which complied with all relevant regulations.'

For more information on PLOS ONE's requirements for paleontology and archaeology research, see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-paleontology-and-archaeology-research.

3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: 

"This study was undertaken within the framework of the ERC project ‘The value of mothers to society: responses to motherhood and child rearing practices in prehistoric Europe’. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 676828, PI Katharina Rebay-Salisbury)."

We note that you have provided funding information that is currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. 

Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: 

"This study was undertaken within the framework of the ERC project ‘The value of mothers to society: responses to motherhood and child rearing practices in prehistoric Europe’. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 676828, PI Katharina Rebay-Salisbury). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

4. Thank you for stating the following in your Competing Interests section:  

"The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."

Please complete your Competing Interests on the online submission form to state any Competing Interests. If you have no competing interests, please state "The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.", as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now 

 This information should be included in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The manuscript by Bas and co-authors reports on oral pathologies (caries, calculus and linear enamel hypoplasia) and macro- and micro-wear texture analyses in a sample of deciduous teeth from 75 individuals aged less than 12 years from the Early Bronze-Age necropolis of Franzhausen I in Austria. All the variables are considered in relation to age and sex of the children, to investigate childhood diet and related oral health.

The authors applied a classic methodological approach alongside with more advanced methods (amelogenin peptide analysis and microwear texture analysis). The study is well designed, and the manuscript is well structured and clearly written. The data are clearly presented and analysed.

The authors should check carefully the references: there are some missing, some duplications and some in the wrong format.

A major concern is about the statement in Materials and methods: “Many of these deaths were likely due to accidents or rapid infections and not chronic disorders, so the sample is generally representative of children within the community”. It seems to me too speculative, and I don’t see how the authors can declare this. I suggest to the authors to carefully explain and justify this statement otherwise delete it. In any case, I would add a reference to the Osteological paradox.

The authors should better explain the two surface texture parameters, i.e., complexity and anisotropy, for non-specialists readers and to better understand the discussions. A description of what they are, and the meaning of their variation is in my view necessary.

The authors must carefully check the figure numbering. There are several errors.

- In results, Dental wear, Fig. 3 B,C,D,E should be Fig. 3 C,D,E,F;

- Reference to Fig. 3F is wrong,

- Fig. 4 G,H,I,J should be Fig.4 A,B,C,D.

- Caption of Fig.4: Please note that the ranges of the x-axes are not the same, should be y-axes.

Results, Microwear texture analysis: It is hard to me to follow the consideration about the children age and anisotropy and complexity. It is not clear if the age ranges reported are wrong or follow a line of reasoning that I cannot see. Moreover, some of the “low” and “high” reported seems to not correspond to the graph. I suggest to the authors to better explain it and make the data reporting clearer also graphically, this latter to better distinguish between the different individuals.

Discussions: The authors use modern, roman, and medieval samples from previous studies to discuss the Early Bronze Age children from the present study. I agree with this because the lack of comparative data from deciduous teeth from prehistoric samples. Said this, the authors should discuss the chronology of their sample first, highlighting that the differences could be related to the different subsistence economy and to discuss in the dietary interpretation the adult prehistoric diet inferred from dental microwear (Mahoney 2016 reports that no difference are scored about microwear texture analysis between permanent and deciduous teeth).

Discussion, dietary interpretation: Based on existing literature, the people buried at Franzhausen I likely began weaning their children before the age of two but a little later than in industrialized populations.

How can the authors support this statement with the data? The method here used is too coarse in time resolution to detect this subtle variation.

Other minor comments

Introduction, second paragraph: “The first objective of this study is to document childhood macroscopic and microscopic dental wear as well as dental caries and dental calculus in non-adults buried at Franzhausen I—focused onindividuals with preserved …”, correct “onindividuals”.

Materials and methods, sample paragraph, refers to Fig.1 somewhere in the text. Reference to Fig.1 is missing in the main text.

Materials and methods, sample, last paragraph: references 41-45 include two repetitions, namely #26-27.

Table 1, caption: LEH is not reported in the table.

Table 6, Age column, first two rows report 34 and 36 (I think is the number of samples).

Reviewer #2: This manuscript aims to provide an analysis of deciduous dental pathology and wear from children excavated from a Bronze Age site in Austria. The analysis provides original data and, as there are very few studies of deciduous dental pathology and wear has some value, although pathology is relatively limited and the wear patterns not especially revealing. There are some issues with the data as it's currently presented that do need to be resolved. In particular the authors need to present the dental pathology data as true prevalence rates - as they currently seem to just be crude prevalence rates, which is inadequate. There also needs to be greater clarity as to what teeth are being recorded. For example, in a child of 8 years with mixed dentition (permanent and deciduous) are only the deciduous teeth included here? If not, then the title of the paper should be altered. Overall, there is a lack of specificity with the dental pathology.

I was confused about the point of comparing BA skeletons with present-day (which is so different in terms of sugar consumption it seems a pointless comparison) - it's also confusing when the term 'industrialized' is used here when the authors mean present-day rather than 1800s onwards. Technically Europe is 'post-industrial' now. It would have been much more appropriate to focus on comparisons with other pre-industrial societies. There is some attempt at comparison with a medieval population but the authors should consider the work of Heidi Dawson in more detail, and also the work on deciduous dental pathology by Sian Halcrow - while these are from different periods and places they are still relevant for the discussion. Overall, the fact that the children have a sex estimated and comparisons between boys and girls could be made was useful and novel for a study such as this, although differences are pretty minimal. It would be more informative to see differences between the isotopes between boys and girls than wear.

Comments

- The title states that this study focuses on the deciduous dentition. The abstract does mentions only 'children'. An age range needs be given as 'children' is a socially specific term. Later in the paper the authors refer to 'under 12s', but these children may have both deciduous and permanent teeth. There needs to be greater assurance that the dental pathologies recorded are only of deciduous teeth (which is not clear). For example, at one point in the paper the authors discuss recording wear on the first permanent molar - so clearly at times teeth other than 'deciduous' are being used. The parameters of this study are very confusing. Please clarify.

-Introduction - tell us the date of the site when first introduced

-Burials are divided into 'infans 1' and 'infans ii' but the age range of each of these categories should be included in the materials and methods text, saying how many individuals in each of the categories. Information for this is only provided later. I also wonder about the choice of these categories given that the discussion centres more on weaning, which will be obscured by the 0-6 year clustering.

-Table 1 needs redoing - provide TPRs and provide more detail on the teeth most affected. Are only deciduous teeth included in this table? If permanent are as well then this needs to be made explicit in the discussion. If only deciduous then more information is required. It's only in the discussion that the authors state that caries affected ten molars and one canine in a sample of 1606 teeth - this should be in the results. Why is the LEH not included in the table of pathologies? Further explanation is required. In terms of the intra-populations comparison of pathologies in Table 5 - this should also be TPRs.

- With the dental wear comparisons of younger and older children need to be clear that when refer to molars they mean deciduous - the language needs to be more precise.

- In the discussion don't equate industrialized societies with the 1990s in Europe. This is confusing and happens regularly.

-In the discussion the authors suggest that "The results suggest that children before the age of 8 or 9 may have consumed

fewer hard food components commonly found outside the domestic setting than their older

counterparts". Please explain more clearly what is meant by this.

- Some of the Figures (e.g. 3 - 7) look a bit blurred on my version.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PONE-D-22-19889R1Dental wear and oral pathology among sex determined Early Bronze-Age children from Franzhausen I, Lower AustriaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kanz,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The revised paper by Bas et al is an improved version of the original submission and almost all the reviewers’ and mine criticisms have been addressed.

There are still few minor problems that should be addressed by the authors about mostly the weaning sections which is still in my opinion rather speculative and not fully convincing. I suggest the authors to tryn again to make it more consistent or to reduce it to a purely speculative point. The sentence “Previous studies of pre-industrial agrarian populations suggest the people buried at Franzhausen likely finished weaning their children before the age of two but a little later than in industrialized populations [72, 73].” Still do not exclude that the authors of ref 72 and 73 worked on the Franzhausen skeletal series. I suggest to change it into “Previous studies of OTHER pre-industrial agrarian populations COMPARATIVELY suggest …..”.

Abstract (line 40 ff) “Dentine exposure very prevalent in all four deciduous molars affecting over >70% of teeth, with other dental wear measurements indicating a relatively high rate of dental wear.” Please rephrase.

I’m sure that after the amendment of the proposed minor issues, this manuscript will be promptly accepted by Plos One.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 12 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Luca Bondioli, M.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The manuscript by Bas and co-authors has been improved after the revision process. The authors carefully considered editor’s and reviewers’ comments, replying to all the issues raised and worked on the text accordingly. Only the weaning issue in the discussion paragraph about Dietary interpretation has not been properly managed. I suggest to the authors to rework this part (Lines 536-540 of the track changes doc) or to delete it (see comment later).

Line 231 (track changes doc): The prevalences of caries, and calculus, and linear….

Add a comma after “caries”

From line 413 (track changes doc): Please check the references #56 #57 #58 in the text (58 appears before 57)

Line 441 (track changes doc): the reference (Duckworth & Huntington; Keyes & Rams, 2016) appears in the text. It needs to be numbered and added to the reference list

Lines 536-540 (track changes doc): In my view the authors didn’t clarify the “weaning issue” here.

I do not agree with the sentence: “Childhood diet begins with the introduction of solid foods in the weaning process”. I would delete this sentence because in my view is wrong. Also, it continues to seem that previous studies refers to Franzhausen people and, as I already said, the method here used is too coarse in time resolution to detect this variation in children diet; moreover, the statement “a little later than in industrialized population” is not supported by data from the present study. Finally, the link with the ceramic baby bottles and the use of animal milk in the weaning process at Franzhausen is totally speculative.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Dental wear and oral pathology among sex determined Early Bronze-Age children from Franzhausen I, Lower Austria

PONE-D-22-19889R2

Dear Dr. Kanz,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Luca Bondioli, M.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: