Growth Study for the Traditional Society without Registration of Birth Date

研究成人的生长发育过程，比较成人的身体形态，对于研究人类的适应和进化是非常重要的。人们对人类成长的研究主要集中在欧洲、美国和日本。然而，在传统社会中，由于缺乏可靠的出生日期登记，生长研究几乎没有做过，尽管它对于人类变异的研究是不可或缺的。我调查了巴布亚新几内亚不同人群的人类生态研究，其中大多数人缺乏可靠的出生日期登记。因此，在这项研究中，我从以下几个方面考察了这类传统社会的成长研究：传统社会中没有正确登记出生日期，而社区成员很清楚自己的出生顺序。根据社区所有成员的出生顺序信息可以估计他们的年龄，并绘制平均生长曲线。将年龄估计应用于Biami人口的数据，并对该方法存在的问题进行了分析，提出了一种新的生长曲线拟合方法，以满足从早龄到成熟期无完整出生记录的数据的应用要求。通过引入两个Logistic函数来描述青春期前和青春期的生长曲线，从前者平稳地切换到后者，为两次测量的Gidra儿童的身高生长提供了良好的模型。尽管对出生日期非常熟悉的Manus人的生长研究不存在年龄问题，但平均生长曲线的估计存在样本量小的问题。1994年，我采用了一种平滑曲线拟合的方法来处理Manus的调查数据。

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.