Sex-Biased Differences in Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy at Síi Túupentak, an Ancestral Ohlone Village in Central California (ca. 540–145 cal BP)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Síi Túupentak (CA-SCA-565/H) is a late precontact ancestral Ohlone village/cemetery site in central California (ca. 540–145 cal BP). Integration of proteomic, genomic, and osteological analyses provided highly confident biological sex estimates for remains of most individuals at this site (65 of 76) spanning all age groups—from perinatal infants to aged adults. The comprehensive nature of this data allowed us to generate sex-specific Kaplan-Meyer survivorship curves for this burial population of sedentary hunter-gatherers. As was common among societies predating modern Western medicine and antibiotics, infant mortality was high for both males and females at Síi Túupentak. However, male infants (from birth to five years of age) appear to have died at nearly twice the rate of female infants and had a mean age of survival at birth of only 19 years, versus 30 years for females. Compared to survival curves for other societies predating modern western medicine and antibiotics, this bias is larger than might be expected. We suspect the pattern of sex-biased infant mortality at Síi Túupentak could relate to an intrinsic survival advantage for female infants, combined with extrinsic factors such as environmental pathogens, nutritional stress, and gendered differences in weaning patterns detected through stable isotope analyses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37028.0