Farming made our ancestors SHORTER!
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.
Remains were found in countries including the UK, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Italy, France, Ireland, Scotland, Bulgaria and the Netherlands.
The sample included preagricultural individuals (those who had to hunt and forage), the earliest farmers and subsequent farmers.
The researchers used long bones of skeletal remains that were also being sampled or already been sampled for ancient DNA testing by other researchers.
Even if the bones were fragmented, identifying what part of the body they were from and measuring them allowed the team to make estimates of an individual’s overall height.
Researchers then created a model that used adult height, indicators of stress seen in the bones, ancient DNA, and genetic indications of ancestry.
Individuals from the Neolithic age – 7,100 to 3,500 years ago, at which point physical changes caused by farming across Europe would have been apparent – were an average of 1.5 inches shorter than previous individuals and 0.87 inches shorter than subsequent individuals, they found.
They also found that heights steadily increased through the Copper (0.77 inch), Bronze (1.06 inch) and the Iron (1.29 inch) ages with respect to Neolithic heights.
However, these results were attenuated when the team additionally accounted for variation in genetic ancestry.
For example, some of the individuals could have been taller not because of their environment such as working conditions, but because they inherited being tall from their own ancestors.
According to the study authors, 80 per cent of height is from genetic makeup and 20 per cent is from the environment.
‘There was movement of people, generally from east to west,’ Professor Marciniak said. ‘We wanted to account for that migration that perhaps brought different proportions of height-associated genetic variants.’
When the team incorporated ancestral information, they found that the height decrease was reduced a bit so that it was not as extreme, although the height drop around the start of the era of farming was still evident.
‘Potential hypotheses about why early farmers were shorter include nutritional deficiency (due to less diverse diets compared to hunters, gatherers, foragers) and increased pathogen loads because of greater human population densities, sedentary lifestyles and closeness to livestock,’ Professor Marciniak told MailOnline.
Bearing in mind the study only focused on 167 individuals, Professor Marciniak said future research should involve larger datasets.
‘Our work represents a snapshot of something that is very dynamic and very nuanced,’ she said.
‘We need to do more to see what is the cause of the decrease in achieved height versus predicted genetic height during the shift to farming.’
The researchers said they believe that their approach is adaptable to studies of past human health and could be applied in other contexts.
The study has been published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
See more here: dailymail.co.uk
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Herb Rose
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Did farming make people shorter or did the shorter less healthy people farm because they couldn’t endure the physical effort involved in hunting?
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Mark Taply
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Hello Herb;
Let me assure you that primitive farming (and even during the great depression when my father and his parents struggled to farm) was much more difficult than hunting. That is why indigenous groups in Africa and also the American Indians typically left the women to toil all day with the tedious never ending farm work, while the “warriors” went off to hunt and fish.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Mark,
Come on Mark, you know the great depression and so called “dust bowl’ were a hoax and a fraud perpetrated by the zionist banks to steal everyone’s property. It was all just hype in the media controlled by the Rockefeller’s and Rothschilds.
I worked one summer on a battle farm and know about stacking hay bales in a barn when the temperature is over 100 F. (You’ll notice I said one summer.) Subsistence hunting is much more difficult, uncertain, and dangerous than farming where you have a secure base and available resources and that was why the women did the farming while the men went out hoping to find game.
Herb.
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Mark Tapley
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Hello Herb:
Nothing is secure in subsistence agriculture. Women until elevated by western Christian culture were of low status and were stuck with tasks that the men did not want. The early white explorers saw first hand the women’s role in these traditional societies. Primitive farming was long arduous work. Rome was a land based socio economic system but had become powerful enough that large numbers of slaves were used as well as landless city dwellers who had fallen into debt.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Mark,
In my experience at gardening (big difference) every year some crops do poorly while others perform well. It seems to change every year but I have never experienced a complete failure.
The Amish here in Pennsylvania seem tone able to produce a lot using primitive methods.
One reason men did not want to do “women work” was because it was considered an insult to their manhood. When I had a garden in a community garden over 90% of the gardeners were men.
Herb
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Mark Tapley
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Hello Herb:
None of what you are referring to is primitive subsistence agriculture. The Amish use steel plows pulled by mules. A huge advantage not available to primitive people. They also have access to improved varieties and irrigation. Many of them will get out the power tools and electricity when they need to. City dwellers piddling around the urban landscape is also not subsistence farming.
My father grew up in rural Arkansas during the Depression. They had mules to plow the fields. They slaughtered all their own animals, ran a smoke house and canned everything they could. There was no elec. gas or running water and the house had no insulation. 82% of Jewmerica’s population today are urban dwellers. Even if they had the arable land and water they would not have the skills to survive in this environment when now all they know how to do is push a cart in the supermarket.. Things gradually got better (as it always would in a real free market system) and my grandparents transitioned into an easier existence. As difficult as this lifestyle was, it was far easier than primitive agriculture.
We have lots of records of the first white men in contact with Africans and Amer. Indians that confirm that in many of these primitive societies, women did most of the subsistence farming. That is not the case with more advanced societies such as the civilized tribes of the eastern U.S.
Hunting on the other hand is one of the easiest endeavors there is. Most of the time you have to just sit in a stand and be patient. The same was true in ancient times.
lloyd
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Let me see. Christian Culture in the Middle Ages and on up to The U.S. in the 20th Century. Women were treated as basically property or an extension of their husbands. That includes mostly CHRISTIAN families in the U.S. I think you need to study actual history and less time pushing Zionist Anti-Jewish conspiracies.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Herb,
I give you credit for knowing something because of your experience and in a day or two you seem to claim to have knowledge (at least write as you do) about farming about which you admit you have very little experience. However, relative too the physical effort that is required in modern farming where a very small percentage of the worlds population are feeding a vast majority of its billions of people. One experience which one cannot experience by reading is the actual physical effort that must be expended in keeping billions from starving. And given what Mark has written I expect you may have experienced more of the physical labor of farming required during one summer than he has yet experienced during his lifetime.
I read and believe that China lost half of its swine herd in 2019 due to disease now I read the poultry are dying in great numbers in the USA at this time. And because I began lifting bales at 10 years and continued working on our family farm for more than a decade I have farming experience. And my brother, a decade older than I because of the 30s died just short of 90. And this from his obituary: “The farming operation was his legacy. He was so proud of its sustaining growth as it entered into the 4th generation. However Edwin never really retired from farming. He helped with planting and harvest well into his 80’s.” Actually, it was into the 5th generation because our grandfather, who came to South Dakota to homestead in 1882, seems to have been forgotten because we never really knew him. Yes, I too am proud of the Krause farming legacy.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Chris*
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The issue is quality protein in the diet. A lack of essential amino acids would have stunted their growth and mental development. Peoples such as the Japanese and the Dutch “shot up” after they had access to quality protein.
Large herbivores including elephants digest dead gut bacteria as their protein source rather than excrete it as humans do.
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Mark Tapley
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Plant based diets pushed by the Hollywood Whores and puppet politicians are the diet of the poor and malnourished. In America of the 1800’s when the incidence of heart disease, diabetes and cancer was almost too low to record, the standard diet was high protein and high quality saturated fat. Only after the widespread use of vegetable (seed oils) for cooking along with the emphasis on low fat and high carb (glucose) diets, did Americans become a society of the chronically sick needing constant medical procedures and drugs.
When looking back at culinary history in America, the finest restaurants focused on top quality meats and rich butter and cream dishes. In the American colonies, deer were a staple of the diet and most people were entirely indifferent about gardening. It is no coincidence that the same MSM that pushes the “safe and effective vaccine” and the “Green Energy” scam are also pushing the elite parasite WEF recommended no meat, “whole grain” vegan diet for all the plantation livestock. Excluding themselves of course.
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