Tuesday, January 22, 2008

More notes on the Neolithic & Europe   posted by Razib @ 1/22/2008 06:30:00 PM
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Reading some stuff on the Neolithic transition. From Neolithic
...Neolithic populations from Europe to Sri Lanka lost an average of two inches in height, and in Japan, there was a two-to-five-year drop in the average age at death for men and a three-year drop for women....

...The skeletons of early agriculturalists also exhibit the marks of common nutritional deficiencies like scurvy (vitamin C deficiency)...and rickets (vitamin D deficiency) which stops growing bone from hardening. But the most common problem seems to have been anemia...When people are severely anemic the skull vault and eye sockets because rough, thick and spongy, a condition seen in 60 percent of the eye sockets and 50 percent of the skull vaults a Alepotrypa Cave in Greece and in 42 percent of the skulls in Zawi Chemi Shanidar in Iran....


From The Widening Harvest: The Neolithic Transition in Europe:

...This region [southern Scandinavia] is likely one of the very few places in Europe that supported a substantial indigenous population prior to the transition to agriculture...With only a few exceptions, most of the continent contains little or no indication of occupation during the period just prior to the transition to agriculture...

...

...Mesolithic foragers were present in northern Europe from approximately 8500 B.C.-shortly after the close of the Pleistocene-about the same time plants and animals were being domesticated in Southwest Asia. By 5000 B.C., and probably earlier, these groups in southern Scandinavia were intensively occupying the coastal areas, living in permanent villages characterized by deep middens of shell and refuse and substantial cemeteries...Special hunting camps were scattered along the coasts and inland around these residential sites. These groups exploited the resources of both the land and the sea, successfully capturing the large quantities of fish, shellfish, marine animals, large and small game, and birds....

...

Agriculture, in the form of domesticated plants and animals, arrived in southern Scandinavian shortly after 4000 B.C. These crops and herd animals are associated with the arrival of the early Neolithic Funnel Neck Beaker (TRB) culture, which likely originated in Poland ca. 4400 B.C. and spread to northern Germany 4200 B.C....


The stuff about the dietary deficiencies are well known. My own interest in vitamin D deficiencies are not focused on rickets; rather, I am curious about the possible relationship between the deficiency, weaker immune systems and the rise of endemic & epidemic diseases. The second book consists of a series of essays which explore the various models for the expansion of the agricultural lifestyle into Europe. Genetic data implies that around 1/4 of the total ancestry of Europeans as a whole is derived from a population signal which originated in Anatolia. That being said, this proportion varies, with far higher proportions along the southeast edge of Europe and far less in the north. The fact that much of Europe was very lightly populated prior to the rise of the farming culture probably is one reason that the genetic signal of the Anatolian cultures is so strong (elsewhere the author of the second quoted passage notes that only two Mediterranean islands were inhabited before the Neolithic).

The second researcher above implies that the spread of agriculture in Scandinavia was almost certainly due to primarily cultural diffusion, taking into account various continuities (artifacts & physical anthropology) as well as the seemingly large native hunter-gatherer population as inferred from settlement sites. It is important to note that human populations were not resident in northern Europe before 8500 B.C. because of the climatic circumstance. Additionally, I wanted to highlight the emphasis on the utilization of sea life for sources of protein, because marine organisms are relatively enriched in vitamin D. The later does note that shellfish were less prominent in Baltic pre-Neolithic sites, so I don't want to overplay that hand, but, do note that a reliance on fish for protein and a later switch to red meat is also attested for Britain.

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