Growth Study for the Traditional Society without Registration of Birth Date

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Investigation of growth process, as well as comparison of adult body physique, is very important for the study of human adaptation and evolution. Human growth has been studied mainly on the subjects of Europe, U.S.A.and Japan. In the traditional society, however, growth study has litte done for the lack of reliable registeration of birth date, although it is indispensable for the study of human variation.I have investigated the human ecological study for various populations in Papua New Guinea, most of which lack the reliable registration of birth date. Thus, in this study, I examined the growth study on such traditional societies for the following points.Birth date is not correctly registered in the traditional societies, while the members of a community knows very well their birth order. It is possible to estimate their age from the information of birth order of all members of community and to draw the mean growth curve. I applied the age estimation to the data of the Biami population and examined the problems of the method.A new method for fitting growth curve is developed to meet the requirement of application to the data from early age to maturity without complete birth records. Two logistic functions are introduced to describe the prepubertal and adolescent growth curves, smoothly switching from the former to the latter, which provide good models of height growth in the Gidra children measured twice.Though no problem of age on the growth study of the Manus people who know their birth date very well, there exist a problem of small sample size for the estimation of mean growth curve. I adapted a method of smoothing curve fitting to the Manus survey data in 1994.