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⁠ Project Status: WIP – Initial development is in progress, but there has not yet been a stable, usable release suitable for the public. Coverage Status CRAN status license ⁠⁠

statuAAR

Calculates human stature estimation from bone measurements.

With statuAAR you can get 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 1965, 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.

How to cite this package

  1. statuAAR website citation

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 data, e.g. Bach1965 into a data.frame.

Bach1965 <- statuAAR::Bach1965

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 if_female if_male if_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.