RESUMO
Ornaments such as beads are among the earliest signs of symbolic behavior among human ancestors. Their appearance signals important developments in both cognition and social relations. This paper describes and presents contextual information for 33 shell beads from Bizmoune Cave (southwest Morocco). Many of the beads come as deposits dating to ≥142 thousand years, making them the oldest shell beads yet recovered. They extend the dates for the first appearance of this behavior into the late Middle Pleistocene. The ages and ubiquity of beads in Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in North Africa provide further evidence of the potential importance of these artifacts as signals of identity. The early and continued use of Tritia gibbosula and other material culture traits also suggest a remarkable degree of cultural continuity among early MSA Homo sapiens groups across North Africa.
RESUMO
OBJECTIVE: To establish inter-rater reliability for genital injury detection among experienced forensic sexual assault (SA) examiners. METHODS: Cross-sectional observational study testing inter-rater agreement of injury assessment among eight experienced SA examiners who each viewed 2-4 digital images from 50 cases. Each case was rated by 4 examiners and included images before and after toluidine blue dye application. We calculated overall agreement and kappa (κ). RESULTS: Examiners had perfect agreement in 60 cases; in 24 cases 3 examiners agreed; in 5 cases 2 agreed and 1 was unsure; and in 9 cases there were 2 "yes" and 2 "no" ratings or 1 "yes," 1 "no," and 2 "unsure" ratings. Overall agreement was 82% (κ, 0.57) when yes|unsure and no|unsure combinations equaled disagreement and 86% (κ, 0.66) when only yes|no dyads equaled disagreement. Neither the number of images nor any single examiner fundamentally influenced results. Highly experienced examiners tended to agree with each other (86%) slightly more often than moderate examiners agreed with each other (75%). CONCLUSIONS: Our set of experienced forensic examiners achieved moderate inter-rater agreement in assessment of the presence of female genital injury on selected digital images obtained during SA examination.
