The oldest amputation on a Neolithic human skeleton in France

While 'surgical' practices such as trepanations are well attested since the first stages of the European Neolithic, the amputation of limbs in Prehistoric periods has not been well-documented until the case presented here. The particularly well-preserved remains of an aged male were recently uncovered in the Neolithic site (4900-4700 BC) of Buthiers-Boulancourt in the vicinity of Paris, France. It was already noticed in situ that the distal part of the left humerus was abnormal and this led us to the hypothesis of a partially healed 'surgical' amputation.The further investigations reported here confirm a traumatic origin and a partial cicatrisation after surgery, indicating that the patient survived. It also proves the remarkable medical skills developed during Prehistorical times. In addition, the associated grave goods are original, including the skeleton of an animal, a polished schist axe and a massive 30 cm long flint pick. Despite the serious handicap from which he suffered in this pastoral-agricultural community, the buried man obviously enjoyed some particular social status, as suggested by the remarkable and 'prestigious' accompanying grave-goods. If indeed this man benefited from some form of community care, this would indicate the level of social solidarity in Western Europe almost 7000 years ago

Anthropometric aspects of the human skeleton

The anatomy deals with learning about the shape and structure of the human body, and at the same time it is the basis for all sciences whose scope of interest relates to the human body. Anthropometric studies are aimed at translating the size and shapes of the human body into specific numbers and quantitative ratios, thus they constitute a set of measurement techniques and methods, through which it is possible to closely examine the diversity of human measurable features as well as variability in individual and evolutionary development. The scope of measurements in anthropometry applies mainly to sections, circumferences, angles between planes or body lines. The aim of the work is to present selected anatomical features of the human skeleton in the aspect of sexual dimorphism and individual human variabilit

Action Capsules: Human Skeleton Action Recognition

Due to the compact and rich high-level representations offered, skeleton-based human action recognition has recently become a highly active research topic. Previous studies have demonstrated that investigating joint relationships in spatial and temporal dimensions provides effective information critical to action recognition. However, effectively encoding global dependencies of joints during spatio-temporal feature extraction is still challenging. In this paper, we introduce Action Capsule which identifies action-related key joints by considering the latent correlation of joints in a skeleton sequence. We show that, during inference, our end-to-end network pays attention to a set of joints specific to each action, whose encoded spatio-temporal features are aggregated to recognize the action. Additionally, the use of multiple stages of action capsules enhances the ability of the network to classify similar actions. Consequently, our network outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on the N-UCLA dataset and obtains competitive results on the NTURGBD dataset. This is while our approach has significantly lower computational requirements based on GFLOPs measurements.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

Fracture Biomechanics of the Human Skeleton

Trauma analysis is a growing area of physical and forensic anthropology. The analysis of fracture patterns is useful in determining cause and manner of death, as well as making inferences about past populations. Traditionally, anthropologists have categorized bone trauma into the discrete categories of blunt, ballistic, and sharp trauma. While these descriptors provide a practical approach, anthropologists need to change the way that trauma is perceived and analysis of fractures is conducted. Bone trauma is best viewed as a continuum (rather than discrete independent categories), with the variables of force, acceleration/deceleration, and surface area of impacting interface governing the appearance of the resulting fractures. The application of this new way of thinking will allow anthropologists to better understand bone fracture and injury to the body as a relationship between the engineering inputs and the anatomical outputs. This new way of thinking is applied to the human skeleton and tested through a series of experimental studies and injury data analyses. The studies include fracture propagation and patterning in the skull, the response of the thorax/upper body to propeller induced trauma, force tolerance for human phalanges, and mechanics of lower limb fractures. The results from these studies assist in reiterating the importance of variables (or “engineering inputs”), such as force, surface area of impacting interface, and acceleration/deceleration, on the resulting injury and fracture patterns (“anatomical outputs”) of the human body. As expected, the magnitude of force clearly influences the severity of fractures. However, comparison of force magnitude is not a “one-to-one” comparison. Surface area between the impacting object and the bone is a crucial variable. It essentially explains differences between blunt and sharp trauma. An example of the surface area variable in this experimental testing involved the propeller impacts to the buttocks and upper body. Note, though, as failure occurs, surface area interfacing can change, resulting in sharp trauma wounds that could contain characteristics of blunt trauma, or vice versa. Intrinsic properties of the bone (such as geometry, location, quality of bone) and its anisotropic and viscoelastic nature should also be considered along with these other engineering variables

Saddle Sore: Skeletal Occupational Markers of Habitual Horseback Riding

Horses became a prominent part of everyday life for many tribes and communities many centuries ago. The horse has been used for transportation, war, and pleasure. These people who habitually used horses for all of these different functions show evidence of this within their skeletal remains in antiquity. The human skeleton can deform and change based on the amount of stress and activity put onto the bones. Seeing the affects of horseback riding on the human skeleton can help researchers, archaeologists and anthropologists find out more about the communities that they are looking at. The skeletons from antiquity and modern-day horseback riders can be affected in similar and differing ways, the body can start to form different growths or pits based on the level of stress. The human skeleton is amazing, but can give great insight into the lives of people everywhere