Estimating trauma prevalence from incomplete human skeletal remains.

ABSTRACT: Traumatic lesions on human skeletal remains are widely used for reconstructing past accidents or violent encounters and for comparing trauma prevalence across samples over time and space. However, uncertainties in trauma prevalence estimates increase proportionally with decreasing skeletal completeness, as once-present trauma might have gone missing. To account for this bias, samples are typically restricted to skeletal remains meeting a predefined minimum completeness threshold. However, the effect of this common practice on resulting estimates remains unexplored. Here, we test the performance of the conventional frequency approach, which considers only specimens with ≥ 75% completeness, against a recent alternative based on generalized linear models (GLMs), integrating specimen completen

SUBMITTER: Beier J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11557604 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature