方法对比

	Osteological Age & Sex Estimation	Ancient DNA Analysis
领域	考古学	考古学
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	1994	2004
提出者	Jane Buikstra & Douglas Ubelaker (Standards synthesis)	Svante Paabo and colleagues (foundational methodology)
类型	Standardized osteological pipeline for estimating age-at-death and biological sex	Laboratory and computational pipeline for recovering and authenticating genetic data from archaeological remains
开创性文献	Buikstra, J. E., & Ubelaker, D. H. (1994). Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains. Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series No. 44. ISBN: 9781563490750	Paabo, S., et al. (2004). Genetic Analyses from Ancient DNA. Annual Review of Genetics, 38, 645-679.
别名	Skeletal Age Estimation, Age-at-Death Estimation, Biological Profile Estimation, Osteological Aging and Sexing	aDNA Analysis, Archaeogenetics, Ancient Genomics, Palaeogenetics
相关	2	2
摘要	Osteological age and sex estimation is the foundational bioarchaeological procedure for building a biological profile from human skeletal remains: estimating how old an individual was at death and determining their biological sex. The skeleton changes in patterned ways across life — teeth form and erupt, growth plates fuse, and joint surfaces and bone microstructure gradually degenerate — and these changes are scored against reference standards to bracket age, while sexually dimorphic features of the pelvis and skull indicate sex. The standardized recording protocols compiled by Jane Buikstra and Douglas Ubelaker provide the discipline's shared methodology, ensuring that age and sex estimates are comparable across analysts and collections. Because the relationship between skeletal change and chronological age is variable, the method emphasizes multiple indicators and explicit uncertainty.	Ancient DNA analysis recovers genetic information from the degraded remains of past organisms — human and animal bones and teeth, and increasingly sediments — and uses it to reconstruct kinship, ancestry, population history, sex, pathogens, and domestication. Because DNA fragments into ever-shorter pieces and accumulates characteristic chemical damage after death, and because a handful of modern molecules can swamp the few authentic ones, the field is defined less by sequencing itself than by an exacting protocol of clean-lab extraction, contamination control, and authentication. The foundational reviews by Svante Paabo and colleagues set out the principles that distinguish genuine ancient sequences from contaminants, and the move to next-generation sequencing transformed aDNA from a fragile curiosity into a routine source of genome-scale data.