Principia Scientific
Written by The Daily Mail
Our ancestors got shorter when they made the switch from foraging to farming 12,000 years ago, a new study shows.
An international team of researchers has analysed DNA and taken measurements from skeletal remains of 167 ancient individuals found around Europe.
The bones had already been dated to either before, after or around the time when farming emerged in Europe 12,000 years ago.
A switch from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to farming crops took an average 1.5 inches off their height, the experts found.
Shorter height is an indicator of poorer health, they say, because it suggests they were not getting enough nutrition to support proper growth.
These first European farmers likely experienced ‘poorer nutrition and increased disease burdens’ that stunted their growth.
Other skeletal ‘stressors’ that the farmers may have experienced include ‘lorotic hyperostosis’, characterised by areas of spongy or porous bone tissue in the skull.
The new study was led by Stephanie Marciniak, assistant research professor at Penn State University’s Department of Anthropology in State College, Pennsylvania.
Periods of human history
Time periods represented by individuals in the study were:
– Upper Paleolithic (38,000 to 12,000 years ago)
– Mesolithic (11,000 to 6,400 years ago)
– Neolithic (7,100 to 3,500 years ago)
– Copper Age (6,300 to 3,400 years ago)
– Bronze Age (4,500 to 2,500 years ago
– Iron Age (2,600 to 2,400 years ago)
12,000 years ago refers to the start of the agricultural revolution in the Fertile Crescent zone (the Near East).
Recent studies have tried to work out the effect of DNA on height, Professor Marciniak said, but her new study also included measuring the bones of ancient individuals, as well as genetic contributions.
‘We started thinking about the longstanding questions around the shift from hunting, gathering and foraging to sedentary farming and decided to look at the health affect with height as a proxy,’ she said. ‘Our approach is unique in that we used height measurements and ancient DNA taken from the same individuals.’
The switch from a hunting, gathering and foraging lifestyle to a settled agricultural lifestyle did not occur across Europe simultaneously, but in different places at different times.
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, starting around 9,000 years ago in Greece, farming economies were progressively adopted in Europe, though areas farther west, such as Britain, were not affected for another 2,000 years and Scandinavia not until even later.
For their study, the researchers studied 167 deceased individuals whose remains were found around Europe – 67 females and 100 males.
All the individuals lived from 38,000 to 2,400 years ago – so both before and after humans began growing their own crops around 12,000 years ago.
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Via https://principia-scientific.com/farming-made-our-ancestors-shorter/
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