Healthy but mortal: human biology and the first farmers of western Europe

Abstract

What do we know about the effects of the transition to agriculture on human biology? A literature has grown up that gives us the impression that we know a great deal about what happened to bones and teeth when people became sedentary farmers. A review of the sources of these ideas and the evidence supporting them, especially based on work in Portugal, reveals that a reconsideration of the biological consequences of farming in Europe is overdue.

Destruction of microstructure in archaeological bone: a case study from Portugal

“…A list of sites and their dates is provided in Table 1, and further details on these sites can be found in Lubell et al (1994) and Jackes et al (1997).…”

Selectivity of Black Death mortality with respect to preexisting health

“…This problem is now widely acknowledged (12)(13)(14)(15). But several researchers hope that it can be circumvented by examining so-called ''catastrophic'' skeletal samples.…”

“…In this study, frailty refers specifically to an individual's age-adjusted relative risk of death before the Black Death (i.e., during normal, nonepidemic times) compared with the rest of the living population of the period. Frailty will be indicated by the presence of at least one skeletal lesion (porotic hyperostosis, cribra orbitalia, linear enamel hypoplasia, periosteal lesions of the tibia, or short femur length) known from prior research to be associated with earlier episodes of infection, under-nutrition, or other forms of physiological stress (10,12,14). The purpose here was to test whether the Black Death killed people indiscriminately-i.e., regardless of frailty as indicated by the presence of skeletal lesions-or whether Black Death mortality behaved like normal, nonepidemic mortality in which individuals with the highest frailty were at the highest risk of death.…”

Evidence of trepanations in a medieval population (13th-14th century) of northern Spain (Gormaz, Soria)

“…In Europe, although there are sporadic cases from the Mesolithic (c. 9000-5000 BCE), as for example the Portuguese skull of Concheiro da Moita do Sebastião (Crubézy et al, 2001), the oldest well-known cases indicate that the trepanation of skulls became usual in the Neolithic period (c. 4500-1800 BCE) or at the beginning of the Bronze Age (c. 1800-850 BCE), especially throughout the Mediterranean basin (Dastugue, 1973;Campillo, 1984;Hershkovitz, 1987;Jackes et al, 1997;Bennike, 2003). The first trepanned European skull was found in 1685 by Bernard de Montfauchon in Cocherel, France (Finger, 1994;Clower and Finger, 2001).…”