Bangkok or bust
A life of poorer quality due to skull & bones
-
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2018
- Posts
- 4,177
Humans have small, slender heads and weaker jaws, because of our discovery of soft foods like cheese and dairy, a new study suggests. Research by The University of California suggests the advent of farming, especially dairy products, had a small but significant effect on the shape of human skulls. The reason is all in the effort it took to eat farmed food. Humans who live by hunting and foraging wild foods have to put more effort into chewing than those surviving on a softer diet of cheese and cereal mush. Without the daily work-out of crunching, grinding and gnawing, bones and muscle declined, refining the features of farming communities.
“The effect of farming is mostly visible in the areas of the skull that generate or experience stress during chewing,” said graduate student David Katz, formerly of UC Davis, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calgary, Alberta.
“The simplest explanation is that these stresses were reduced because farming diets were generally softer.”
Hunter gatherers began to rely on diets from domesticated plants and animals from around 10,000 years ago, and archaeologists have noted the skulls began to shrink but could never quantify the change or say why it happened.
To pick out the changes, researchers studied more than 1,000 skulls and jaws from pre-industrial groups throughout the world who were either hunter gatherers or farmers.
They found that in farming communities one part of one of the major chewing muscles, the temporalis, became smaller and changed position as communities changed their diet. As a result the upper jaw became shorter and the lower jaw smaller.
A previous study by The University of Cambridge suggested that over time human skeletons have become much lighter and more fragile since the invention of agriculture as we switched from foraging to farming.
While human hunter-gatherers from around 7,000 years ago had bones comparable in strength to modern orangutans, farmers from the same area over 6,000 years later had significantly lighter and weaker bones that would have been more susceptible to breaking. Bone mass was around 20 per cent higher in the foragers - the equivalent to what an average person would lose after three months of weightlessness in space.
Sedentary Farming stock.
Hunter, gatherer, warrior, protector of tribe, active.
“The effect of farming is mostly visible in the areas of the skull that generate or experience stress during chewing,” said graduate student David Katz, formerly of UC Davis, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calgary, Alberta.
“The simplest explanation is that these stresses were reduced because farming diets were generally softer.”
Hunter gatherers began to rely on diets from domesticated plants and animals from around 10,000 years ago, and archaeologists have noted the skulls began to shrink but could never quantify the change or say why it happened.
To pick out the changes, researchers studied more than 1,000 skulls and jaws from pre-industrial groups throughout the world who were either hunter gatherers or farmers.
They found that in farming communities one part of one of the major chewing muscles, the temporalis, became smaller and changed position as communities changed their diet. As a result the upper jaw became shorter and the lower jaw smaller.
A previous study by The University of Cambridge suggested that over time human skeletons have become much lighter and more fragile since the invention of agriculture as we switched from foraging to farming.
While human hunter-gatherers from around 7,000 years ago had bones comparable in strength to modern orangutans, farmers from the same area over 6,000 years later had significantly lighter and weaker bones that would have been more susceptible to breaking. Bone mass was around 20 per cent higher in the foragers - the equivalent to what an average person would lose after three months of weightlessness in space.
Birth of farming caused jaw-dropping changes to the human skull, scientists find
It’s certainly a fact worth chewing over.
www.telegraph.co.uk
Hunter, gatherer, warrior, protector of tribe, active.
Last edited: