5 ms·
"(A shocking 91% of patients survived in an additional sample of just nine skulls from the northern highlands between 1000 C.E. and 1300 C.E.)" Uhm... how? If
by blotter_paper 8y ago
"(A shocking 91% of patients survived in an additional sample of just nine skulls from the northern highlands between 1000 C.E. and 1300 C.E.)"
Uhm... how? If just one had died from a sample of nine, that would be a success rate of ~89%. How do you get to 91% without jumping all the way to 100%?
- taneq 8y agoThe ninth one was only mostly dead.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DrScump 8y agoAnd they didn't consider that their sample was already biased in favor of survivors? Didn't the Inca and their predecessors dispose of their non-nobility dead mostly via air burial and burning?
- maxerickson 8y agoWhat bias are you proposing? That they ennobled the survivors?
- Y_Y 8y ago> A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors? You don't bury survivors, and you give better medical treatment to nobles.
- maxerickson 8y agoYou bury them eventually, which is the pertinent consideration if you are worried about burning the bodies destroying evidence. That people with higher status received better treatment wouldn't really impact assessing how advanced their technique was, it would just show it at its best (which is sort of the thing being assessed, what sort of outcomes did their knowledge enable).
- DrScump 8y agoNo, that nobles were more likely to get the best surgeons, if non-nobles got surgery at all. Remember, human sacrifice was common[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#South_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#South_America
- IncRnd 8y agoYep. That casts doubt on the scientific validity of everything else claimed. For this statistic, either the percentage is wrong, or they really meant 10/11 or 11/12.