THE ESSENTIAL
- The bones of adults who lived between 38,000 and 2,400 BC were combed through.
- The shift from hunting and gathering to farming is said to have resulted in an increase in people’s physical fitness and population growth, alongside a decline in physiological health.
“The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture over the past 12,000 years has impacted culture, biology and human health.” This was stated by a group of researchers in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences April 6. In their work, they revealed that this transition made our ancestors smaller.
In order to reach this conclusion, the researchers looked at the height of people who lived during the Neolithic period, the last period of prehistory. They measured the bones of the skeletal remains of 167 adults who lived before and following humans began farming their own land. The authors analyzed osteological and DNA data from the same prehistoric humans to investigate variation in human stature as an indicator of health during the transition to agriculture.
The shift from hunting and gathering to farming has reduced our size
According to the results, early farmers were shorter in stature, even following correcting for individual genetic contributions to stature. According to the researchers, people who lived in the last period of prehistory lost 3.82 cm in height compared to men who lived during the Paleolithic (first period of prehistory) and during the Mesolithic (intermediate period between the Paleolithic which precedes it and the Neolithic which succeeds it). People living in the Neolithic period were 2.82 cm shorter than expected compared to adults who lived in the Pre-Neolithic period.
“At present, we know that height is 80% genetic and 20% environmental. Researchers have not yet identified all of the genetic variants associated with height,” said Stephanie Marciniak, author of the study and professor at Pennsylvania State University (USA), in a statement. “Poor diet and/or higher disease burden among early farmers may partly explain this result. (…) Overall, our work highlights the potential of integrating disparate data to explore indicators of health in prehistory”can we read in the works.