Madrid. Although humans have been evolving for millions of years, the past 12,000 years have been some of the most dynamic and impactful for the way we live today.
This is explained by Clark Spencer Larsen, professor of anthropology at Ohio State University, United States, in a special article published in Proceedings, of the National Academy of Sciences of that country.
In a statement, the researcher pointed out that the modern world began with the arrival of agriculture. Along with food crops, humans also planted the seeds for many of the most pressing problems in modern society.
“Although the changes brought about by agriculture have brought us many good things, they have also led to increased conflict and violence, an increase in infectious diseases, reduced physical activity, a narrower diet, and increased competition. for the resources,” he added.
Larsen is organizer and editor of the special article and author of the introduction to the section, titled “The last 12,000 years of behavior, adaptation, population, and evolution shaped who we are today,” which includes eight texts based mostly on in bioarchaeology, that is, the study of human remains and what they can tell scientists about changes in diet, behavior and lifestyle over the past 10 millennia or so. Larsen is co-author of two of them.
One message that connects all the articles is that today’s major social problems have ancient roots. “We have not gotten to where we are by chance. The current problems, such as wars, inequalities, diseases and poor nutrition, are a consequence of the changes that occurred when agriculture began, ”he said.
The shift from foraging to farming led humans, who had led mostly transient lives, to create settlements and live a much more sedentary existence. “That has had profound implications for virtually every aspect of our lives then, now and in the future,” he said.
The cultivation of food allowed the world population to rise from about 10 million people in the last Pleistocene epoch to more than 8 billion today.
But it came at a cost, as the varied diet of the foragers was replaced by a much more limited diet of domesticated plants and animals, often of reduced nutritional quality.
Now, much of the world’s population depends on three foods, rice, wheat and corn, especially in areas with limited access to animal sources of protein, Larsen recalled.
Another important change in the human diet was the incorporation of dairy products. In one of the articles in the special section, the researchers examined dental calculi found in mortal remains to show that the first evidence of milk consumption dates from about 5,000 years ago in northern Europe.
“This is proof that humans were genetically adapted to consume cheese and milk, and it happened very recently in human evolution. It shows how humans are biologically adapting to our new lifestyle.”
As people began to create farming communities, social changes were also taking place. Larsen is co-author of a paper that analyzed strontium and oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel from early farming communities from more than 7,000 years ago to help determine where the residents came from. The results showed that Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, was the only one of the communities studied in which non-indigenous people apparently lived.
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