Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Longevity. Cultural or Biological?

Is Human Longevity a Consequence of Cultural Change or Modern Biology?

By Caspari and Lee

DOI 10.1002/ajpa.20360

So they look at the OY ratio of human and neanderthals from Europe and western Asia at different time periods. Here's the sample:



They then cast some stats voodoo:
The approach of data-resampling provides a way to solve problems that lie outside the analytical boundaries of classical statistics (Efron and Tibshirani, 1993), e.g., using ratios as the statistic of interest, as in this study. Resampling also addresses the problem of interdependence of data within the death distribution, and the potential further dependence of later samples on earlier ones because of evolutionary change. As in our previous study, the null hypothesis that there is no difference in OY ratios among the different hominid groups can be stated as a question of probability: how likely is it to observe an OY ratio of a particular hominid group in another group of interest? When the test group’s OY ratio was smaller than that of the resampled group, we rejected the null hypothesis if a ratio the same as or lower than the observed OY ratio was found, on average, in 5% or less of the distribution generated from the comparative group. When the test group’s OY ratio was larger than that of the resampled group, we rejected the null hypothesis if, on average, 5% or less of the distribution was the same as or greater than the observed OY ratio.


So the OY ratio is different amongst Asian early moderns and Upper Paleolithic moderns and is different amongst Neanderthals from Europe and Asia. It is NOT different between Asian moderns and Neanderthals.

In sum, space and time make a difference, not phylogeny.

No comments:

Post a Comment