statuAAR

A R package to calculate human stature estimation from bone measurements.

With statuAAR you can calculate human stature estimations according to several well established formula based on measured bone length. All you need is a table with individuals in rows and measurements in columns, or a repeated individual ID and one measurement per row. Different formulas can be selected for each data set, e.g. Breitinge & Bach 1956, Pearson 1899 or Ruff et al. 2012, and the correspondig results will be provided as a list with one data frame for each formula.

To date, a large number of formulas have been developed for various bone measurements and reference populations, yielding a wide range of possible results. The quality of the result depends mainly on the representativeness of the original sample used in the formula in relation to the data collection at hand. A straightforward and quick calculation using different formulas allows for easy comparison of the different results.

A general introduction to human stature estimation based on bone measurements can be found, for example, in

• Ruff, Chr. B. (ed.) (2018). Skeletal variation and adaptation in Europeans: upper Paleolithic to the Twentieth Century. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

• Siegmund, F. (2019). Die Körpergröße der Menschen in der Ur- und Frühgeschichte Mitteleuropas und ein Vergleich ihrer anthropologischen Schätzmethoden. (Beiträge zur Archäologie des Lebensstandards, 1). Norderstedt: BoD.

We provide a description for each formula, including required or possible bone measurements and citations (s. bibliography file BibTeX). Bone measurements are designated according to:

• Martin, R. (1928). Lehrbuch der Anthropologie in systematischer Darstellung: mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der anthropologischen Methoden / für Studierende, Ärzte und Forschungsreisende. 3 vols. Fischer: Jena.

The package is still under development, but the basic workflow of data preparation, verification and calculation is possible. Explanatory vignettes are in preparation.

Installation

statuAAR is currently not on CRAN, but you can use devtools to install the development version. To do so:

if(!require('devtools')) install.packages('devtools')
library(devtools)
install_github('ISAAKiel/statuAAR')

Quick start

Get a df of the available formula and measures

statuAAR::getFormulaDataframe()

Check Breitinger & Bach 1965 documentation

?statuAAR::breitinger_bach_1965

Read csv data, e.g. Bach1965.csv into data.frame

statuAAR::Bach1965 <- read.csv(
    "data-raw/Bach1965.csv",
    sep = ",",
    header = TRUE,
    skip=3,
    stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
    check.names = FALSE
  )

Prepare tabled data into a long list (statuaar_data_table)

dl.bach1965 <- statuAAR::prep.statuaar.data(Bach1965, d.form = "wide",
               measures.names = "short", sex = "sex", stats = FALSE)

Check the measurements using general statistics.

statuAAR::measures.statistics(dl.bach1965)

measure	n	MinM	Quart1	MedianM	MeanM	Quart3	MaxM
Fem1	64	292	382	436	434	490	557
Hum1	64	220	278	311	309	343	387

Get the stature estimations of the provided measurements. The function returns a list with a data frame for each formula.

statuAAR::getStature(c('bb65'), dl.bach1965)

$bb65

id	sex	stature	bone	female	male	indet	n_measures
32	m	1540	Hum2, Rad1b, Fem1, Tib1b	1531	1540	1536	4
33	m	1550	Hum2, Rad1b, Fem1, Tib1b	1538	1550	1544	4
34	m	1560	Hum2, Rad1b, Fem1, Tib1b	1546	1560	1553	4

Licence

statuAAR is released under the GNU General Public Licence, version 3. Comments and feedback are welcome, as are code contributions.