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How Farming Reshaped Our Genomes
sciencehabit writes "The earliest farmers may not have been built for the profession. They may have been unable to digest starch and milk, according to a new ancient DNA study of a nearly 8000-year-old human skeleton from Spain (a hunter-gatherer who had dark skin and blue eyes). But these pioneers did already possess immune defenses against some of the diseases that would later become the scourge of civilization. The findings are helping researchers understand what genetic and biological changes humans went through as they made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming."
I eat four cubits of stegosaurus for breakfast every day. Do you know like the air that we breathe would be like toxic to prehistoric humans.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sit...
Who says he let his hair and beard grow long? What evidence from the skeleton would have led to this conclusion?
It means not being too choosy what you om-nom-nom on when the going is lean. Which likely means eating things which may have various parasites, mold spore, other fungi, even partially decomposed. "What luck! A partially decomposed squirrel with red rashes all over its body! Num!" That which didn't kill them, indeed make them stronger (those which survived, that is.)
In today's scrubby, scrub scrubbed world of clean, inspected and otherwise near perfect world of meat, dairy and produce, we're not challenging our bodies very much. Further, we appear to be adapting to eating sugary, fried or other highly processed food, which means we say "Ewww!" when presented with ethnic foods we haven't seen before, which include the globby or wiggly bits of animals we don't see in the meat case at the market (which traditionally were the best parts, unlike the muscle which was often left behind.)
Somewhat disconcerting how we haven't turned into beings which are entirely fed by capsule, a la the Jetsons "Oh, dear, I've overcooked the steak and potatoes pill."
Fortunately, infants keep picking up dead bugs off the carpet and chewing on them, which gives them some bit of a test in developing their immune systems.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I keep hearing about more and more people having issues with foods like dairy and wheat...
What is this silliness, that "humans" in the broad, blanket sense could not digest starch? Feh.
We already know from analysis of Neanderthal remains that they could digest starch, and did in fact eat things like starchy tubers and grains. By 8000 years ago, it's generally accepted that the Neanderthals were no more, at least as a distinct population, and that any remaining Neanderthal-specific genes had been absorbed by the wider Cro Magnon population. (Interestingly, it sounds like the Neanderthal genes might give their descendants, i.e. non-sub-Saharan-Africa humans, extra resistance to viral infection.)
This study, where evidence from one individual is extrapolated to the entire human population, sounds silly in the extreme. "One Size Fits All!" never really does.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Yes, but this evidence points to that may be wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
makes breasts a curious adaptation.
At the time, we humans needed a steady food supply. Hunting and foraging is too sporadic - and hence why we developed this ability to gain fat easily and it's a bitch to get rid of it. Feast or famine.
Agriculture and the the high calorie grains like wheat and corn allowed us to survive and develop a society where we have farmers and other professions.
Now that model is obsolete in the modern Western World, we are paying the price of our inability to adjust our taste buds.
High calorie food tastes great! But we're not suffering from food shortages or doing enough physical work to justify those tastes.
Wheat and corn didn't fuck us - our inability to judge our caloric needs is what screwed us.
This is the equivalent of me saying all humans cannot process lactose or gluten because I cant. Everyone is different.
All mammals are, by definition, born with the ability to digest milk, therefore they have the genes to do that. It can happen that those genes are epi-genitically turned off in adults that are not exposed to milk. However, the genes would be still there.
Thus I'm extremely doubtful that any genetic studies could have revealed the lack of milk digesting genes. And since I don't see how they could assess any epi-genetic state of a long dead individual I really wonder about how they arrived at that conclusion.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What is this silliness, that "humans" in the broad, blanket sense could not digest starch? Feh.
We already know from analysis of Neanderthal remains that they could digest starch, and did in fact eat things like starchy tubers and grains. By 8000 years ago, it's generally accepted that the Neanderthals were no more, at least as a distinct population, and that any remaining Neanderthal-specific genes had been absorbed by the wider Cro Magnon population. (Interestingly, it sounds like the Neanderthal genes might give their descendants, i.e. non-sub-Saharan-Africa humans, extra resistance to viral infection.)
This study, where evidence from one individual is extrapolated to the entire human population, sounds silly in the extreme. "One Size Fits All!" never really does.
Cheers,
Or they could have been using something starchy as a toothbrush.
Far too many think that evolution is a relatively simple thing. A bit of radiation, some changes, and then genetic selection occurs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our DNA is designed to solve the radiation issues (otherwise, you get cancer and die quickly). Instead, there are a large number of unknown virus that move from eukaryote to eukaryote. It will take a sequence of genes from one species, to another. Basically, animals that are in close contact will get genes from the other.
One of the implications for this, is that the more that we remove wildlife, the more that we are destroying our own evolution. It is a mistake to do that. In fact, when we move off the planet, unless we bring a large numbers of animals and plants, the off-planet colony will come to a near halt WRT evolution.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No. Boobs still awesorne
It also seems rather dubious from an evolutionary selection pressure standpoint. Are we to take from TFA that not being able to digest starches in particular, among all the available food options, was sufficient to wipe out the entire population genetically lacking this capability?
In a Adam and Eve type of story, yes.
Wheat and Corn, allowed for civilizations to grow and prosper.
One of the premises in Jared Diamond "Gun Germ and Steel", is that the ability for a civilization to really grow we needed grain, otherwise the culture will stay in more of a hunter gather type of living. Major Civilizations, Mayans, and Aztecs had Maize/Corn type of grains, Middle East and Europe had Wheat, East Asia had Rice. This is because they were a rather High protein food, that can be easily dried and stored, so average guy didn't need to spend most of his life gathering food, and had time, to think and create and improve.
So if you are living in a society you also get extra baggage, that often makes you think you want to long for the good old hunter gather days, forgetting about things such as illness, starvation, dehydration... So other then worry about if I will survive the next day, you worry about things like, how am I doing compared to the next guy, I am working too hard and I am not getting a fair pay from it.... While I am not trying to make these issues unimportant, they are an improvement over the problems that existed before. But they are some unnatural side effects such as self imposed stress, and a diet that may not be optimal...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Incas had potatoes. It does not need to be a grain. But starchy foods are usually more effective in useful energy generated per acre.
In the Pacific breadfruit was the staple. However it was so easy to grow there that there wasn't a lot of work 'farming' anything.
I can't get the "dark skin and blue eyes" link to work.
Atkins fanatics are totally myopic. There are countless civilizations around the globe that have subsisted on tubers probably since before humans were humans. Many of the existing ones are archetypical healthy sub-populations, just like other sub-populations with heavily protein based diets.
Remains have been found of the first known lactose-intolerant celiac! Research is continuing, but he may have died of starvation as he had to send all his restaurant dishes back to the kitchen for including allergens. A compounding factor was all of his friends wouldn't eat out with him anymore because it was such a picky eater.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Dark skin/ blue eyes could be North African. Blue eyes also occurs in non European population. Although some people could say that the blue eyes can from the Vandals. You should be careful extrapolation from a single individual. I would wait for some more DNA studies of ancient skeletons.
The link won't open in FF 26 on Fedora for me for some reason
You a big dummy!
Sure. Throughout human history our populations have hovered as low as a few thousand or at times even a few hundred or less. There are billions of us today and you understandably wonder how the heck evolution could produce profound changes so quickly. It's easy: we usually had very low population numbers.
Also, I'm no geneticist but I believe there's some quirky phenomenon with the calculus of reproduction where it's almost guaranteed that over the course of some time period it's nearly inevitable that a small number of chromosomes will come to completely dominate a breeding population, irrespective of environment. It's why every living human being can trace their mitochondrial DNA to a single "Eve", even though there were many carriers of other mitochondrial lineages both before and after our shared Eve. There's no reason to believe our shared Eve ancestor had superior mitochondrial DNA; she just happened to win the numbers game.
Everybody loves to focus on Darwinian evolution, but there are other evolutionary phenomena that don't strictly involve reproductive success viz-a-viz mutations. Sometimes it simply involves entropic behaviors or other weird mathematical functions.
That must be the "Old MacDonald had a Farm" genome ...or Mr. Green Genes.
That is the 'gatherer' part of hunter gatherer. Humans can digest a lot of starchy foods even without cooking. Pine nuts, walnuts, etc. As for tubers, we can eat carrots even raw. While carrots have been selectively bred, the are precursors to carrots native which can be eaten raw too.
While it is true some foods are dangerous without cooking this is not specific and doesn't apply to all starches.
Wheat is particularly hard to eat because it needs milling and cooking. There are dangerous components in it raw.
One of the differences Diamond points out in his book is the difficulty in storing foodstuffs in certain climates. It's not too hard to store many grains that are commonly available in Europe and northern Asia, but go south and it becomes much more difficult to store foodstuffs like tubers and breadfruit for any period of time. This is significant because it allowed for people to do things rather than have to hunt for food all the time.
genetically? Steven J Gould is firing up the typewriter right now! Heresy!
" unable to digest starch and milk"
Newsflash: we still can't digest starch. Nor is there any dietary need for it. Only 2/3 of the world carries the gene to digest gluten.
Everybody can digest milk, it's our first food. 1/3 of the world can digest lactose past childhood. Article makes no sense.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Try to prove there is a god. You can't, cause there isn't.
You're the one who's deluded, buddy.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Wheat is particularly hard to eat because it needs milling and cooking. There are dangerous components in it raw.
Wheat (and most other grains, beans and seeds) can be sprouted easily, which turns them into an easy-to-eat-raw food (which is also more nutritious and easier to digest than the dry kernel), and also makes them easier to fashion into a sort of dough for bread (lightly pounding with hand tools, instead of milling). This is a process that has been in use for thousands of years.
I have heard it said that before industrial wheat farming, harvesting and storage, bundles of harvested wheat stalks might sit a day or two in the fields, with sufficient moisture from dew to start sprouting some of the grains. Of course, sprouts spoil easily and don't store, so it has been beneficial for modern agriculture to harvest, dry and store the grains as quickly as possible to prevent this.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
If modern people are adapted then wouldn't the lack of adaptation show up in indigenous groups who never developed agriculture?
Hunter gatherers from later times have been shown to have laws and they did have reproduction quotas in order to sustain enough food etc...
yes, there is cultures that already had overpopulation solved prior they adopted farming/stationary living...
heck they had even Court systems of sorts and laws despite being illiterate.
> ...a new ancient DNA study of a nearly 8000-year-old human skeleton from Spain _these_ pioneers did already possess immune defenses against some of the diseases that would later become the scourge of civilization...
What?
He's a moron then. The fact is the Incas had a vast empire. The largest and most technologically advanced in the Americas. The Aztecs had maize and they did not fare better.
In the Pacific breadfruit is so easy to plant and harvest people spent most of their days doing something else. Sometimes nothing. In a lot of the early expeditions to the Pacific it was common for sailors to jump ship and go native because they were sick of the harsh conditions at sea and at home.
The problem is Pacific islands, where breadfruit grows, typically are not resource rich in ore to begin with. While Polynesians did have several advanced designs for sea faring vessels, e.g. trimaran design, they did not bother with much else.
Also ignored is the fact that quinoa was widely available in those places as a replacement. It is not as nutritious but would work in case of dire need.
You may be thinking of The Hardy Weinberg equation, but it's not quite the way you phrased it.