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Biological anthropologists have a strong tradition of studying growth and development and research on aging has been limited. This paper explores the past and current contribution of biological anthropologists to the field of aging through an examination of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA) and the American Journal of Human Biology (AJHB). It is clear from this survey that biological anthropologists and human biologists have predominantly studied growth and developmental processes relative to aging. However, there is a trend of increasing interest in aging over time. In the AJHB, papers discussing chronic disease were predominant, followed by reproductive aging (19%), bone aging (15%) and body composition (10%). Within the AJPA, the majority of articles were in the field of human biology (43%) and bioarchaelogy (42%) with a lesser contribution from primatology (14%) and dermatogliphics (1%). Biological anthropologists still have great potential to make contributions to gerontology with our evolutionary and holistic perspectives and focus on cross-cultural research.

Primarily during the past 15 years a distinct new area within physical anthropology has emerged, biomedical anthropology. Physical anthropologists have become heavily involved in studying problems of relevance to the health and illness patterns of living humans. There has been a proportionate increase in biomedically focused papers published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, in biomedically focused papers presented at annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and in physical anthropology doctoral dissertations oriented toward modern biomedical phenomena. Proportionately more physical anthropologists are now employed in medical schools and there has been recent growth in the proportion of physical anthropologists in anthropology departments who claim some aspect of biomedical anthropology as a research interest. Increasingly, physical anthropologists are focusing their research on cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in America. These distinct trends are partially a result of the nature of physical anthropology and its unique biocultural perspective. However the growth of applied anthropology, the present academic marketplace, and the availability of research funds are probably also contributing factors. The emergency of biomedical anthropology holds promise for the future of physical anthropology and for its current employment crisis. Careers with academic and nonacademic organizations engaged in biomedical research appear to be a viable alternative to careers in departments of anthropology, for biomedical anthropologists. This will entail some reorientation of graduate training for physical anthropologists. More emphasis will have to be placed on substantive biomedical subjects, research methods, and data management and analysis.

Abstract We thank Thomas Wilson and Jonathan Hill for their useful comments on an earlier version of this introduction. Notes 1. In the field of sociology, for example, the American Sociological Association has a section on emotions, the British Sociological Association has a study group on emotions, and the European Sociological Association hosts a research network on emotions. Anthropologists are no less institutionally committed to the study of emotions. For example, the Society for Psychological Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, publishes the journal Ethos, which functions as a major platform of discussion about emotional dynamics. Human geographers are also in the process of establishing a journal that will centre more specifically on the study of emotions in spatial contexts. 2. A 2004 special issue of Ethos on emotions contains papers presented on a panel organised by Tom Boellstorff and Johan Lindquist at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling (Milton and Svašek 2005 Milton, K. and Svašek, M. . 2005. "Mixed Emotions". In Anthropological Studies of Feeling, Oxford: Berg. [Google Scholar]) resulted from the workshop entitled "Theorizing Emotions," organized by the editors at Queen's University Belfast. In 2006, the participants of two interdisciplinary workshops at Queen's University Belfast focused on the themes of emotional dynamics in transnational families (Skrbiš 2008 Skrbiš, Z. 2008. Transnational Families: Theorising Migration, Emotions and Belonging. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29(1) [Google Scholar]; Svašek 2008 Svašek, M. 2008. Who Cares? Families and Feelings in Movement. Journal of Interculture Studies, 29(1) [Google Scholar]) and explored emotional interactions between migrants and members of local communities. In 2002 and 2006, two large interdisciplinary conferences were organised by Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson, and others at the University of Lancaster and the University of Ontario, which led to the publication of Emotional Geographies (Davidson et al. 2005 Davidson, J., Bondi, L. and Smith, M. 2005. Emotional Geographies, Aldershot: Ashgate. [Google Scholar]). 3. In 2006, for example, at the bi-annual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, nine contributors presented papers in the session "Emotional Attachments in a World of Movement," discussing topics that ranged from Tibetan sensibilities in the Indian diaspora (Timm Lau) to memory and sentiment amongst displaced Serbs in the United States (Birgit Bock-Luna). The session was organised and convened by Dimitrina Mihaylova and Maruška Svašek. 4. It is not surprising that in the light of increasing reflexivity in anthropology, some anthropologists have explored the emotional interaction between themselves and their informants (Behar 1996 Behar, R. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. [Google Scholar]; Ewing 1987 Ewing, K. 1987. Clinical Psychoanalysis as an Ethnographic Tool. Ethos, 15(1): 16–40. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Kirschner 1987 Kirschner, S.R. 1987. 'Then What Have I to Do with Thee?': On Identity, Fieldwork, and Ethnographic Knowledge Cultural Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology, 2(2): 211–234. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). In September 2006, at the conference "Emotions in the Field" (organised by James Davies and Dimitrina Mihaylova at Oxford University), scholars from various backgrounds (mainly anthropology and psychoanalysis) discussed this issue. 5. They argued that certain speakers of English could say things like: "The discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational plane," "We put our feelings aside and had a high-level intellectual discussion of the matter," and "He couldn't rise above his emotions" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 6. A similar charge of implicit neglect of emotional realities in social analyses has been directed to studies of how transnational family life have treated emotions (Skrbiš 2008 Skrbiš, Z. 2008. Transnational Families: Theorising Migration, Emotions and Belonging. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29(1) [Google Scholar]). 7. As Ahmed et al. (2003 Ahmed, S., Castañeda, C., Fortier, A. and Sheller, M. 2003. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Oxford: Berg. [Google Scholar]: 10) have argued, the "work of making home, affective and physical, is an ongoing process." This implies that it is necessary to "[unsettle] linear narratives of origin and migration; and [rethink] the relation between embodied subjectivity, place and belonging."

Abstract This paper surveys the development of physical anthropology in the period from 1880 to 1980, beginning with the founding of the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology and the advent of professionalism in anthropology. The growth of physical anthropology within academic anthropology and the effect of the bias toward ethnology and archaeology is considered. Three historical phases are suggested: pre‐1900, the pre‐academic period of physical anthropology; 1900–1930, the initial development of academic physical anthropology, which witnessed the founding of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists by Hrdlička, and of Hooton's program at Harvard University; 1930‐present, which has seen the full development of physical anthropology in an academic context.

The demography of the Jomon people was first systematically investigated by Kobayashi ([1967] Journal of the Faculty of Science, The University of Tokyo, Section V, 3: 107–162). His life-table analysis indicated that Jomon life expectancy at the age of 15 was only 16 years. However, recent advances in palaeodemography have questioned whether the reconstruction of demographic parameters from skeletons actually reflects the real mortality patterns of past populations. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that palaeodemographic data from skeletal remains represent an appropriate adult mortality profile. If the hypothesis is the case, the mortality profile of the Jomon people implied the heavy work-load resulting in the unusually high mortality schedule. If it is not the case, on the other hand, Kobayashi’s data had been distorted by the errors of adult age-at-death estimation. This study examined well-preserved auricular surfaces of 86 individuals, which are individuals aged 15 years and above. Age estimation of the auricular surfaces was performed using two techniques: the original method of Lovejoy et al. ([1985] American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 68: 15–28) and the revised method of Buckberry and Chamberlain ([2002] American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 119: 231–239). The results indicate important findings on the mortality profile of the Jomon people. First, the revised estimation has older age distributions, with the majority of individuals over 65 years of age. Second, the revised estimation increases the life expectancy at the age of 15 from 16 years to 32 years. The present data lead to the conclusions that the revised method improves the accuracy of age estimation for elderly adults, and that the Kobayashi’s estimation does not represent the real mortality profile. These findings will have great effects on the life history reconstruction of the Jomon people.

Biological distance analysis, the dominant type of skeletal biological research during the 19th century, has become less visible in recent years. Although the proportion of American Journal of Physical Anthropology articles and published abstracts focusing on biodistance has remained fairly constant over the three decades between 1955 and 1985, the proportion of biodistance contributions relative to other skeletal biology studies has decreased. Emphasis in skeletal biology has shifted from the analysis of biological variation to investigations of health and diet, and within biodistance studies methodological issues have assumed prominence over purely analytical approaches. This paper investigates trends in biological distance analysis through a survey of articles and meetings abstracts published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology from 1955 to 1985. The survey provides the historical context for five symposium papers on skeletal biological distance presented at the 1986 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Due to their medicolegal repercussions, forensic anthropology conclusions must be reliable, consistent, and minimally compromised by bias. Yet, a synthetic analysis of the reliability and biasability of the discipline's methods has not yet been conducted. To do so, this study utilized Dror's (2016) hierarchy of expert performance (HEP), an eight-level model aimed at examining intra- and inter-expert reliability and biasability (the potential for cognitive bias) within the literature of forensic science disciplines. A systematic review of the forensic anthropology literature was conducted (1972-present), including papers published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Forensic Anthropology, Forensic Science International, and the Journal of Forensic Sciences and Anthropology Section abstracts published in the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the AAFS which matched keywords such as "forensic anthropology," "bias," "reliability," "cognition," "cognitive," or "error." The resulting forensic anthropology HEP showcases areas that have ample research and areas where more research can be conducted. Specifically, statistically significant increases in reliability (p < 0.001) and biasability (p < 0.001) publications were found since 2009 (publication of the NAS report). Extensive research examined the reliability of forensic anthropological observations and conclusions (n = 744 publications). However, minimal research investigated the biasability of forensic anthropological observations and conclusions (n = 20 publications). Notably, while several studies demonstrated the biasing effect of extraneous information on anthropological morphological assessments, there was no research into these effects on anthropological metric assessments. The findings revealed by the forensic anthropology HEP can help to guide future research, ultimately informing the development and refinement of best-practice standards for the discipline.

Abstract In previous limited investigations of the human femur/stature ratio we (Feldesman and Lundy: Journal of Human Evolution 17:583–596, 1988; Feldesman et al.: American Journal of Physical Anthropology 79:219–220, 1989) have shown it to be remarkably stable across ethnic and gender boundaries. In this study we evaluate the femur/stature ratio in 51 different “populations” of contemporary humans (n = 13,149) sampled from all over the world. We find that the mean ratio of femur length to stature in these populations is 26.74%, with a very restricted range of variation. When we compare mean femur/stature ratios of males and females, there are no statistically significant differences. ANOVA performed on a naive grouping of samples into “whites,” “blacks,” and “Asians” indicates that there are significant racial differences ( P &lt; 0.001). When we subject these groups to Tukey's HSD procedure (a post‐hoc test), we find that “blacks” are responsible for the significant ANOVA, being significantly ( P &lt; 0.005) different from the other ethnic groups. “Whites” and “Asians” are not significantly different ( P = 0.067) under the conditions of this analysis, although all these racial comparisons may be suspect given the small sample sizes. We tested the efficacy of the ratio in three situations: predicting stature of repatriated white Vietnam veterans; predicting stature in a random sample of South African blacks (of known stature), and predicting the stature of a single Akka pygmy. In the first and third cases, the femur/stature ratio does better than the traditionally recommended regression equation, while in the second case the predictions from the femur/stature ratio are less accurate than from the appropriate regression equation. These results encouraged us to apply this ratio to mid‐ and late‐Pleistocene fossil hominids, where the choice of reference population for stature estimates continues to trouble workers. We estimated stature for a sizeable number of Homo erectus (HE), early Neanderthal (EN), Near Eastern Neanderthal (NEN), and early anatomically modern Homo sapiens (EAMHS) by using the simple relationship: stature (cm) = femur length (cm) * 100 / 26.74. Our results show that HE fossils are slightly taller on average than either EN or NEN samples, which do not differ significantly in stature, while EAMHS fossils are significantly taller than all three earlier groups. While these results are not surprising, our stature estimates for these fossils differ from currently published estimates based on sample‐specific regression‐based formulae. We compare the results, discuss the differences, and highlight potential sources of error in both regression and ratio‐based estimates of stature. We conclude that in estimating stature of hominid fossils the femur/stature ratio, which is gender‐ and ethnic‐group neutral and simpler to calculate, may provide more satisfactory results than the group‐specific regression formulae.

The sternal surface of the 4th rib has been suggested as a useful predictor of adult age-at-death (Iscan et al.: Journal of Forensic Sciences 29:1094-1104, 1984; American Journal of Physical Anthropology 65:147-156, 1984). We tested its ability to do so in two tests. In the first, we developed a method of seriation and target age assignment for the 4th rib so that inaccuracy and bias of the method could be assessed by decade. We found that the 4th rib shows characteristic changes in morphology with age and can be included in multifactorial age estimates. In the second test, we applied the phase method developed by Iscan et al. (Journal of Forensic Sciences 29:1094-1104, 1984). The results of our three judges were generally similar to those reported by Iscan and Loth (Journal of Forensic Sciences 31:122-132, 1986). Measures of race differences in 4th rib morphology were included in both tests. Americans of African descent (black) showed a non-significant trend for the rib changes to be delayed compared to Americans of European descent (white). This is in contrast to the work of Iscan et al., which predicted that blacks would show a tendency toward accelerated rib changes compared to whites, especially after the early 30s (phases 5-7) (Iscan et al.: Journal of Forensic Sciences 32(2):452-466, 1987).

Abstract Stature estimation of individuals from extinct human populations is a classic topic in anthropology. The estimations, using regression formulae generated from different reference samples, display different results. This fact is related to inter‐populational differences in body proportions, which is a phenotypic trait mainly correlated with climatic parameters. The aim of this paper is to address the problem of stature estimation of an archaeological skeletal sample from Patagonia – a region for which there are no specific models available – using different methods and considering differences in body proportions between reference and target populations. The sample used in this analysis is composed of 35 Late Holocene adults of both sexes recovered in central Patagonia (Argentina). The stature of each individual was first reconstructed using the anatomical method [Fully G. 1956 . Une nouvelle me´thode de de´termination de la taille. Annales Medicine Legale 35 : 266–273], which has no assumptions on body proportions. The results were compared with estimations based on 32 different regression formulae [Trotter M, Gleser G. 1958. A re‐evaluation of estimation of stature based on measurements taken during life and the long bones after death. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 16 : 79–124. 10.1002/ajpa.1330160106] and three femur/stature ratios [Feldesman MR, Fountain RL. 1996. Race specificity and the femur/stature ratio. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 100 : 207–224. 10.1002/(SICI)1096‐8644(199606)]. The average reconstructed stature was 160.8 cm for females (95% confidence band = 155.6–166.2 cm), and 170.5 cm for males (95% confidence band = 168.8–172.2 cm). Most of the comparisons of the regression formulae and femur/stature ratios showed significant differences, which are explained by differences in body proportions between the Patagonian sample and the ones chosen as reference. Finally, a set of new equations was developed using simple regression techniques. It is suggested that whenever possible, population‐specific formulae should be used in archaeological studies. In any other situation, the choice of a reference population should be made by taking into account its geographic (latitudinal) provenance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

A number of studies which were published in the<i>American Journal of Physical Anthropology</i>form the basis for this book. They were made into an integrated whole by the addition of further studies. The reader is escorted through a study of the sulci of subhuman primates, from the lemur to the chimpanzee (118 pages) to the sulcal pattern in man. A chapter on encephalometry describing the author's method compares the brain of apes with that of man. The development of the human sulcal pattern is followed by a description of the brain of newborn infants and children. To a detailed study of the brains of white persons and Negroes (80 pages) which had previously appeared in the<i>American Journal of Physical Anthropology</i>there is appended a general discussion of brain and race: "Frequency differences in the fissural pattern as well as in other morphological features occur in the brain of

Anthropometry involves the external measurement of morphological traits of human beings. It has a widespread and important place in nutritional assessment, and while the literature on anthropometric measurement and its interpretation is enormous, the extent to which measurement error can influence both measurement and interpretation of nutritional status is little considered. In this article, different types of anthropometric measurement error are reviewed, ways of estimating measurement error are critically evaluated, guidelines for acceptable error presented, and ways in which measures of error can be used to improve the interpretation of anthropometric nutritional status discussed. Possible errors are of two sorts; those that are associated with: (1) repeated measures giving the same value (unreliability, imprecision, undependability); and (2) measurements departing from true values (inaccuracy, bias). Imprecision is due largely to observer error, and is the most commonly used measure of anthropometric measurement error. This can be estimated by carrying out repeated anthropometric measures on the same subjects and calculating one or more of the following: technical error of measurement (TEM); percentage TEM, coefficient of reliability (R), and intraclass correlation coefficient. The first three of these measures are mathematically interrelated. Targets for training in anthropometry are at present far from perfect, and further work is needed in developing appropriate protocols for nutritional anthropometry training. Acceptable levels of measurement error are difficult to ascertain because TEM is age dependent, and the value is also related to the anthropometric characteristics of the group of population under investigation. R > 0.95 should be sought where possible, and reference values of maximum acceptable TEM at set levels of R using published data from the combined National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys I and II (Frisancho, 1990) are given. There is a clear hierarchy in the precision of different nutritional anthropometric measures, with weight and height being most precise. Waist and hip circumference show strong between-observer differences, and should, where possible, be carried out by one observer. Skinfolds can be associated with such large measurement error that interpretation is problematic. Ways are described in which measurement error can be used to assess the probability that differences in anthropometric measures across time within individuals are due to factors other than imprecision. Anthropometry is an important tool for nutritional assessment, and the techniques reported here should allow increased precision of measurement, and improved interpretation of anthropometric data.