Human remains from Marina el-Alamein
The aim of the paper is to draw a health profile of a past human population—the Graeco-Roman inhabitants of a harbor city at the site of Marina el-Alamein on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt—and to study levels of adaptation of this population to the environment in which it lived. The author presents her methodology: the conceptual framework, skeletal inventory and scoring procedures, the uses her data to discuss in detail the paleodemography (demographic population structure and patterns of mortality) and physiological stress (disruption of growth and maturation), which can be defined as a physical disruption resulting from unhealthy environmental conditions with deleterious effect on both the individual and population level. Life expectancy was found to be at 39.1 years for males and 33.4 years for women. Based on skeletal growth of the most vulnerable subgroups of the population, infants and children, The people who were buried in the tombs of Marina el-Alamein lived a stressful life in an impoverished environment and their diet was inadequate. Overall dental health was very poor, significantly more so among women, and the high rates of arthritis and degenerative diseases of the spine and the major joints were suggestive of heavy workloads in life.