Bioarcheological Perspectives on the Timing of Adolescence in Rural Avar-Age Austria, 7th-9th Centuries ce

This study provides insights into adolescent development during the early medieval period in Austria and offers a point of comparison of the timing of sexual maturation relative to the Imperial Roman and the late medieval periods.

The timing of adolescent development of 89 individuals in two rural cemeteries from the middle to late Avar period (ca. 650-800 ce) was reconstructed using skeletal and dental indicators. This is the first study to employ genetic sex estimation via ancient DNA on all analyzed adolescents, enabling robust assessment of sex-specific patterns of growth and development.

Females were on average 1-2 years younger than males at each development stage. Adolescents appear to have developed later during the late Avar period compared to the previous Roman (0.4-2.3 years) and to a lesser extent later than the late medieval period (by up to 1.2 years).

These developmental differences may reflect the impact of different living conditions in urban and rural settings as well as underlying genetic variation. While general ages of adolescence were comparable between the early and later medieval groups, the earliest observed age of menarche is 3 years later in the later medieval period than in the Roman group. The timing of the physiological transition is consistent with an increase in grave goods in the early medieval sites. Greater standardization in puberty assessment, age, and biological sex estimation is needed to improve cross-population comparability of future adolescence studies from different contexts in the past.