What's luck got to do with it? A generative model for examining the role of stochasticity in age-at-death, with implications for bioarchaeology

Abstract

Introduction

The role of “luck” in determining individual exposure to health insults is a critical component of the processes that shape age-at-death distributions in mortality samples but is difficult to address using traditional bioarcheological analysis of skeletal materials. The present study introduces a computer simulation approach to modeling stochasticity's contribution to the mortality schedule of a simulated cohort.

Methods

The present study employs an agent-based model of 15,100 individuals across a 120 year period to examine the predictive value of birth frailty on age-at-death when varying the likelihood of exposure to health insults.

Results

Birth frailty, when accounting for varying exposure likelihood scenarios, was found to account for 18.7% of the observed variation in individual age-at-death. Analysis stratified by exposure likelihood demonstrated that birth frailty alone explains 10.2%–12.1% of the variation observed across exposure likelihood scenarios, with the stochasticity associated with exposure to health insults (i.e., severity of health insult) and mortality likelihood driving the majority of variation observed.

Conclusions

Stochasticity of stressor exposure and intrinsic stressor severity are underappreciated but powerful drivers of mortality in this simulation. This study demonstrates the potential value of simulation modeling for bioarchaeological research.