Storey Rebecca
Department of Anthropology, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-5020, USA.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2007 Jan;132(1):40-7. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.20502.
Comparison of different adult age estimation methods on the same skeletal sample with unknown ages could forward paleodemographic inference, while researchers sort out various controversies. The original aging method for the auricular surface (Lovejoy et al., 1985a) assigned an age estimation based on several separate characteristics. Researchers have found this original method hard to apply. It is usually forgotten that before assigning an age, there was a seriation, an ordering of all available individuals from youngest to oldest. Thus, age estimation reflected the place of an individual within its sample. A recent article (Buckberry and Chamberlain, 2002) proposed a revised method that scores theses various characteristics into age stages, which can then be used with a Bayesian method to estimate an adult age distribution for the sample. Both methods were applied to the adult auricular surfaces of a Pre-Columbian Maya skeletal population from Copan, Honduras and resulted in age distributions with significant numbers of older adults. However, contrary to the usual paleodemographic distribution, one Bayesian estimation based on uniform prior probabilities yielded a population with 57% of the ages at death over 65, while another based on a high mortality life table still had 12% of the individuals aged over 75 years. The seriation method yielded an age distribution more similar to that known from preindustrial historical situations, without excessive longevity of adults. Paleodemography must still wrestle with its elusive goal of accurate adult age estimation from skeletons, a necessary base for demographic study of past populations.
在同一个年龄未知的骨骼样本上比较不同的成人年龄估计方法，有助于推进古人口统计学推断，同时研究人员也在梳理各种争议。耳状面的原始老化方法（洛夫乔伊等人，1985年a）基于几个不同的特征进行年龄估计。研究人员发现这种原始方法难以应用。人们通常忽略的是，在确定年龄之前，存在一个排序过程，即对所有可用个体按照从最年轻到最年长的顺序进行排列。因此，年龄估计反映了个体在其样本中的位置。最近的一篇文章（巴克伯里和张伯伦，2002年）提出了一种修订方法，将这些不同的特征划分到不同的年龄阶段，然后可以使用贝叶斯方法来估计样本的成人年龄分布。这两种方法都应用于来自洪都拉斯科潘的前哥伦布时期玛雅骨骼群体的成人耳状面，结果得到的年龄分布显示有大量老年人。然而，与通常的古人口统计学分布相反，一种基于均匀先验概率的贝叶斯估计得出的群体中，57%的死亡年龄超过65岁，而另一种基于高死亡率生命表的估计仍有12%的个体年龄超过75岁。排序方法得出的年龄分布与工业化前历史情况中已知的分布更为相似，不存在成年人寿命过长的情况。古人口统计学仍必须努力实现从骨骼准确估计成人年龄这一难以捉摸的目标，这是对过去人口进行人口统计学研究的必要基础。
