Wool they, won’t they: Zooarchaeological perspectives on the political and subsistence economies of wool in northern Mesopotamia

An important facet in the study of complex societies involves documenting how the extraction of resources to support political structures (the political economy) impacted the subsistence economy of everyday life. Caprine production was a central feature of ancient Mesopotamian subsistence, while ancient texts reveal that wool was centrally important to the region’s political economies. It has long been thought that at some point in the Chalcolithic or Bronze Age (c. 4500–1500 BC) caprine husbandry was reorganized at the regional level to support the wool industry that was so dear to state finance and elite wealth. Here, we use kill-off patterns and biometrics to test whether caprine husbandry patterns across northern Mesopotamia underwent a regionwide transformation. We synthesize existing data and use Bayesian modeling to estimate average sheep size, male–female ratio, and harvesting patterns targeting older sheep. We confirm previous assessments that document an increase in sheep size in the 4th millennium BC. We find no pattern in male–female ratios. Diachronic kill-off data from across the region show subtle and local shifts in the slaughter of older caprines. While ambiguities in the data persist, there is no evidence of a dramatic shift toward intensive wool production at the regional level

Psychomotor skills for the undergraduate medical curriculum in a developing country--Pakistan

Objective: To identify essential psychomotor skills for all the medical graduates of an undergraduate programme in Pakistan.Materials and Methods: Twenty-five physicians practising in a tertiary care centre and ninety primary care physicians used a Likert\u27s scale, ranging from very essential to not required at all , to mark 99 psychomotor skills in the undergraduate medical curriculum in Pakistan.Results: Overall the opinions of both the groups about the essential skills matched except for a few areas.Conclusion: This study provides baseline data about psychomotor skills that a medical graduate in developing countries should be able to perform. Further studies will be undertaken by involving other stakeholders to identify and incorporate these skills in the undergraduate medical curriculum, thereby enabling graduates to practice in all the settings in Pakistan

Bile acid and immunosuppressive therapy in primary biliary cirrhosis

Primary Biliary Cirrhosis (PBC) is a chronic, cholestatic liver disease characterized by non-suppurative destruction of interlobular and septal bile ducts, with subsequent liver damage and eventually development of cirrhosis. The disease is relatively rare with an estimated annual incidence and point prevalence in Europe of about 14 and 114 per million population respectively.The course of the disease is variable and unpredictable, but potentially fa1tal