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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."
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.