title: Technical note: false catastrophic age-at-death profiles in commingled bone deposits.
abstract: Age-at-death profiles obtained using the minimum number of individuals (MNI) for mass deposits of commingled human remains may be biased by over-representation of subadult individuals. A computer simulation designed in the R environment has shown that this effect may lead to misinterpretation of such samples even in cases where the completeness rate is relatively high. The simulation demonstrates that the use of the Most Likely Number of Individuals (MLNI) substantially reduces this bias.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioarchaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927, Warszawa, Poland.
authors.forename: Arkadiusz
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sołtysiak
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000365:Age Determination by Skeleton / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000885:Anthropology, Physical / Q000379:methods*; D001842:Bone and Bones / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008875:Middle Aged; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: catastrophic age-at-death pattern; computer simulation; minimum number of individuals; most likely number of individuals