Final answer:
Juvenile age estimation, while focusing on skeletal changes, faces challenges like bias towards younger age samples and wide terminal age intervals. Transition analysis offers more precise age estimates, addressing traditional methods' limitations. Continuous data collection is essential for improving juvenile age estimations.
Step-by-step explanation:
Some issues with juvenile age estimation involve biases and limitations in traditional paleodemographic methods. These methods are based on skeletal changes which vary significantly among individuals. Estimation challenges include the tendency to underestimate older adult ages due to reference samples composed mainly of younger individuals, causing what is known as "age mimicry." This leads to age distributions that are nearly identical across different populations, impeding the comparison of mortality profiles. In juveniles, the estimation of age typically relies on epiphyseal fusion, dental development, and eruption. However, assessing exact ages in juveniles can also be challenging due to individual variations and the broad age ranges of terminal age intervals.
Transition analysis has been suggested as a method to overcome some of these issues, providing point estimates of age with 95% confidence intervals. This addresses the problem of traditional methods that produce biased age estimates towards the known-age reference sample and allows for more precise aging, even in older adults. For juveniles, continuous collection of data is necessary to refine age estimation methods and account for variations within this population.