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."

Comments

Re:Why is he unkempt?

[pesho]

The five blade flint stone razor blade has not been invented yet.

Re:Why is he unkempt?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Look, they found him with a "Cobal Programming in UNIX for Dummies" book. What more evidence do you need?

Re:At the time ....

[jxander]

Corn subsidies, mostly. The middle of the US is nothing but giant flat open space, making it uniquely suited to growing a TON of corn.

So the government pays farmers to grow corn. It's a US crop, and we really can't import it (no one else grows it) so corn subsidies get the "America F*** YEAH!" vote

But then we have just too much corn. Way WAAY too much corn. So we try to turn it into Ethanol gas for our cars, and high-fructose-corn-syrup for our foods.

Both failed miserably, but when the Ethanol screwed up a bunch of cars, people just bought new cars. When HFCS ruined peoples figures, well going to the gym is hard, and buying a new less-fat ass is expensive

And we still have way too much freaking corn.

Prehistoric Lactose-Intolerant Celiac

[Irate Engineer]

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.