The professor wrote:
Quote:
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Your research questions did not address a social/ environmental/ demographic factor which affected how well your hypothesis could draw a connection between a change in health through time and a social factor.
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I thought that transitioning from a hunter\gatherer culture to an agricultural one was plenty social\environmental\demographic.
My assignment:
This assignment regards a burial site that was found in England, seemingly a mass grave from the Black Plague, but as they excavated it, they found two older graveyards underneath it, and for the assignment, "I" sent DNA samples from ten skeletons from the medieval layer for analysis.
Here is most of the data, which I really did not think was very complete:
This is my award-winning response. I appreciate any feedback, even if it is just "Do push-ups!"
Dental caries refer to cavities. I think that the rest of the terms are explained later on, but since I have gone through a great deal of information, I may be taking some of it for granted.
1. Identify evidence from the Berkchister data that demonstrates a change in a specific health outcome over time.
31% of the skeletons found in Pit VI, from the Mesolithic Period, were of infants or children, while it was 21.2% for the Neolithic period, and 14.5% for the Medieval Period, for individual graves. It was 9% for Medieval mass graves.
2. Given this piece of evidence, write a research question that investigates the relationship between the change in health outcome and change in a social, environmental, or demographic factor.
What lifestyle changes across these three periods caused the infant and child mortality rate to drop?
3. Pose a hypothesis that states the nature of the relationship between the change in health outcome and change in a social, environmental, or demographic factor.
There was an increasingly more stable food source, reducing the risk of malnutrition.
4-6: Repeat steps 1-3 but start with a different line of evidence that generates a new research question and new hypothesis.
4. Evidence #2
The percentage of medieval adolescent skeletons in mass graves is more than double the percentage in individual graves.
5. Research Question #2
If the medieval mass graves represent poorer people and individual graves represent richer people, why were poor youth aged 10-17 dying at least twice as fast as their rich counterparts?
6. Hypothesis #2
The poor medieval adults had better jobs, allowing them to distance themselves more from the disease vectors, while the adolescents were more exposed.
7. Write a summary report (approximately 2 paragraphs) that includes your final interpretation of the changes in health through time at the Berkchister Parish site. Use the module materials and Berkchister statistics to address the following: 1) Does overall health improve or decline through time? 2) What factors (social, environmental, cultural, demographic, etc.) likely contributed to these changes?
This data left me with far more questions than the two that I described above. Was the medieval site used before or after the bubonic plague? Twenty-six-point-four percent of the skeletons at the medieval dig site were in mass graves, but that statistic is not necessarily representative of victims. Since the only indication of dying of the plague were being buried in the pits and the one aDNA result that was positive for Yersinia pestis, is there any way of knowing whether the rich who died of the bubonic plague were buried individually or were also buried in the mass grave? One skeleton was positive for tuberculosis and the spine showed the extreme distortion characteristic of Pott’s disease, but the chart shows 1.6% of the skeletons in the individual graves had tuberculosis. There were 186 skeletons in individual graves, so two other spines showed the characteristic distortion? The Mesolithic skeletons did not show Cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis; Kent Johnson explained in the video that these conditions could have been the body’s response to fighting anemia or malnutrition. Larsen explained that the change in diet from meat to grain would not have provided sufficient iron (Larsen, 2006). He also described the starch-rich diet, particularly sugar, as being responsible for the increase in dental caries, which roughly quadrupled after the Mesolithic Period.
Daniele Antoine suggested that the plague might not have been the bubonic plague as always believed (Antoine, 2008), although the aDNA evidence from the Berkchister Parish site demonstrates otherwise. The video discussed bone trauma, like the tibia that had broken and then healed, from the Mesolithic age, and then introduced skull trauma during the Neolithic age. Larsen explained that humans have always engaged in violence amongst ourselves, especially due to competition for resources, and this escalated as population increased (Larsen, 2006). However, the population exploded between the Neolithic and Medieval periods, with a slight decrease in trauma. Plague might not exactly cure war, although it undoubtedly would be a distraction; however, 8.6% of individuals buried in individual graves had trauma. Did the rich need to fight off the poor? There is not any indication of life expectancy, aside from the percentage of adult skeletons. Did they die at eighteen or fifty? Finally, Lawn and Zumla explain that Tuberculosis is not new, it has existed for thousands of years, killing one in one thousand in the 17th century (Lawn and Zumla 2011). Did the earlier dig sites pre-date this disease? Was it not common enough to show up? It seems difficult to separate the overall health of the medieval area, due to the plague. Taking that into account, it seemed decidedly worse.