Practice question · Multiple choice
A cemetery shows high infant mortality and, among adults, unusually good health. Why might that be a statistical artefact rather than a finding?
Hints
- Ask who is in a cemetery: the population, or those who died?
- A skeleton showing a healed lesion survived it. What does an unmarked skeleton tell you?
Show the answer
B. The osteological paradox: the dead adults are the survivors
Why
Lesions record survival long enough to remodel bone, so the sickest may die unmarked and the marked may be the robust, selective mortality inverts the reading. Wood and colleagues named the paradox in 1992, and it reframed a century of palaeopathology as evidence about who died rather than how people lived.
Practise Bioarchaeology
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Bioarchaeology
- Sort each isotope by what it primarily reveals.
- A cemetery with many skeletons showing healed disease lesions must have been a sicker population than one…
- Order these skeletal age markers from the youngest age they appear to the oldest.
- A skeleton shows no disease lesions at all. Why does that NOT establish that the person was healthy?
- Match each isotope system to its headline result.
- Which conclusions can bioarchaeology reasonably support from a well-preserved cemetery?
- A skeleton shows enamel hypoplasia lines and a healed fracture. Why do the two together say more about this…