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Mobility of human populations at the end of the Stone Age
ČERVINKA, Pavel
The presented work entitled "Mobility of Human Populations at the End of the Stone Age" describes, generalizes, summarizes and subsequently evaluates the factors of migratory tendencies in prehistory - for the period of Neolithic over Eneolithic to Early Bronze Age. Emphasis is placed on the clarification of all interdisciplinary issues. Further on a detailed description of individual processes and archaeological approaches to them. As a basis for my own research, a database of data impacted by articles based on the study of strontium isotopes was created. In the next steps, the database was processed using statistical tools and its outputs were contingency tabletables and charts. Spatial assessment and their contexts were conducted in the GIS (Geographic Information System).
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Throwing ability in human evolution
Struška, Michal ; Sládek, Vladimír (advisor) ; Hora, Martin (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to describe the origin of bone markers that characterize individuals who throw habitually and the usability of these markers in research of past populations. The thesis also summarizes knowledge of the origin and development of projectile weapons in Pleistocene. The effectiveness (accuracy and speed) of throw is probably related to differences in morphology of pectoral girdle, torso and hand. Therefore, a part of the text summarizes the morphology of pectoral girdle, torso and hand in the species H. erectus, which was probably the first group of hominins able to throw with effectiveness close to the one of anatomically modern humans. The development of projectile technology, which came after the adoption of effective throwing ability, is usually inferred from archaeological findings of spears and arrows. Various interpretations of archaeologically found weapons bring different conclusions regarding the usage of these weapons. The usage may be inferred from bone characteristics originating as consequences of moves that individual executes when manipulating weapons.
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Sex assessment of skull using exocranial meshes from CT scans
Musilová, Barbora ; Brůžek, Jaroslav (advisor) ; Friedl, Lukáš (referee)
Sex estimation is a challenging problem in both forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology. Sexual dimorphism is most noticeably displayed by the pelvis; however in instances when it is not preserved, sex is estimated by skull. There is a multitude of approaches that use the skull, however, their population specificity and variable sexual dimorphism oscillation reduces their effectiveness (Bruzek and Murail, 2006). We base our contribution on the study by Abdel Fatah et al. (2014) that estimates sex based on exocranial and endocranial surfaces with a high success rate of 97%. Our approach uses anonymized CT scans of skulls from recent french population, from which the exocranial surface was segmented. On these surfaces, CPD-DCA (Dupej et al., 2014) was performed. We analyzed both form and shape (form after size normalization) of these surfaces in 104 skulls (53 males, 51 females) aged 18 to 92 years. The mean age was 58 years in females and 52.46 years in males. Classification was performed using support vector machines (SVM) with a radial kernel. Leave-one-out crossvalidation was also applied. The highest success rate (87.5 %) was achieved with the first 27 principal components of form. Classification of shape was less accurate by only 2 %. Even though our success rate was lower than that of Abdel...
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Use of stable isotopes in hair for understanding nutrition and population migration
Tomášková, Anežka ; Brůžek, Jaroslav (advisor) ; Kovačiková, Lenka (referee)
The analysis of stable isotopes of teeth and bones shines a new light on bioarcheology, understanding of nutrition as well as mobility of mankind in past. However studying stable isotopes which can be found in animal or human hair (carbon - δ13 C, nitrogen - δ15 N, oxygen - δ18 O and probably more) provide information of the same quality. This kind of information is not enriching only to bioarcheology, but also to other fields connected to antropology such as forensic science or medicine. This paper delivers basic overview of principles of determinig the content of stable isotopes in biological material and show advantages and disadvantages of using hair. Information which are used for further understanding of nutrition, mobility and geo-origins are demonstrated on examples from bioarcheology, forensic and clinical medicine.
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Biological characteristics of individuals from the baroque level of St. Benedict cemetery in Prague - an analysis of the demographical crisis
Pinkr, Tomáš ; Brůžek, Jaroslav (advisor) ; Černý, Viktor (referee)
The target of this thesis was to identify mass graves in the cemetery around the former St. Benedict Church in Prague dated after 1635 and to determine, by means of dental epigenetic traits, if there is a biological relation among selected groups of mass graves and if they belong to one population. The analysis of the archaeology-anthropologic documentation was the essential part of this thesis. By this analysis it was possible to identify mass graves and to combine them to higher groups according to the following criteria: a location of the mass grave at the cemetery, a position of individual burials in the mass graves, the burial way and artefacts found. The previous research made by the French-Czech team, namely radiocarbon dating of several graves, was also supportive. The actual investigation of the biological relation (similarity) of individuals from mass graves was carried out by means of dental epigenetic traits. These traits were evaluated according to verbal description and plaster casts of teeth (Turner at al. 1991). The following statistical methods were used for the evaluation: a measure of divergence and the mean measure of divergence stating the unlikeness of probability occurrence of corresponding features. The relation of individuals, from mass graves, and French and Austro-Hungarian...
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