Very pleased to have a new paper out that illustrates long-term interaction between diet, body size, activity, and demography over 30,000 years in the central Mediterranean. A great test of life history models across subsistence transitions, led by EΓ³in Parkinson.
Multiproxy bioarchaeological data reveals interplay between growth, diet and population dynamics across the transition to farming in the central Mediterranean - Scientific Reports
The transition to farming brought on a series of important changes in human society, lifestyle, diet and health. The human bioarchaeology of the agricultural transition has received much attention, however, relatively few studies have directly tested the interrelationship between individual lifestyle factors and their implications for understanding life history changes among the first farmers. We investigate the interplay between skeletal growth, diet, physical activity and population size across 30,000 years in the central Mediterranean through a βbig dataβ cross-analysis of osteological data related to stature (nβ=β361), body mass (nβ=β334) and long bone biomechanics (nβ=β481), carbon (Ξ΄13C) and nitrogen (Ξ΄15N) stable isotopes (nβ=β1986 human, nβ=β475 animal) and radiocarbon dates (nβ=β5263). We present the observed trends on a continuous timescale in order to avoid grouping our data into assigned βtime periodsβ, thus achieving greater resolution and chronological control over our analysis. The results identify important changes in human life history strategies associated with the first farmers, but also highlight the long-term nature of these trends in the millennia either side of the agricultural transition. The integration of these different data is an important step towards disentangling the complex relationship between demography, diet and health, and reconstruct life history changes within a southern European context. We believe the methodological approach adopted here has broader global implications for bioarchaeological studies of human adaptation more generally.
