Motherhood, Milk, and Money. Infant Mortality in Pre-Industrial Finland

Moring, Beatrice

doi:10.1093/shm/11.2.177

Cited by 26 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…These associations may have resulted from indirect effects on maternal condition and direct effects on the availability of gruel fed to infants (37). An alternative is selection effects: cohorts suffering high mortality in their first year are subsequently comprised of only a subset of the original individuals (30), which have shown greater survival and which may be more "robust" and not representative of the original cohort.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influence of early-life nutrition on mortality and reproductive success during a subsequent famine in a preindustrial population

Hayward

Rickard

Lummaa

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

121

118

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Individuals with insufficient nutrition during development often experience poorer later-life health and evolutionary fitness. The Predictive Adaptive Response (PAR) hypothesis proposes that poor early-life nutrition induces physiological changes that maximize fitness in similar environments in adulthood and that metabolic diseases result when individuals experiencing poor nutrition during development subsequently encounter good nutrition in adulthood. However, although cohort studies have shown that famine exposure in utero reduces health in favorable later-life conditions, no study on humans has demonstrated the predicted fitness benefit under low later-life nutrition, leaving the evolutionary origins of such plasticity unexplored. Taking advantage of a well-documented famine and unique datasets of individual life histories and crop yields from two preindustrial Finnish populations, we provide a test of key predictions of the PAR hypothesis. Known individuals from fifty cohorts were followed from birth until the famine, where we analyzed their survival and reproductive success in relation to the crop yields around birth. We were also able to test whether the long-term effects of early-life nutrition differed between individuals of varying socioeconomic status. We found that, contrary to predictions of the PAR hypothesis, individuals experiencing low early-life crop yields showed lower survival and fertility during the famine than individuals experiencing high early-life crop yields. These effects were more pronounced among young individuals and those of low socioeconomic status. Our results do not support the hypothesis that PARs should have been favored by natural selection and suggest that alternative models may need to be invoked to explain the epidemiology of metabolic diseases.developmental plasticity | silver spoon | human life-history | DoHAD

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influence of early-life nutrition on mortality and reproductive success during a subsequent famine in a preindustrial population

Hayward

Rickard

Lummaa

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

121

118

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“…Furthermore, as might be expected from a measure of food supply, the effects were generally restricted to the landless social class (i.e., those with less access to food). Individuals from landowning families may have experienced long-term effects of early nutrition on adult reproductive performance, e.g., through long-term consequences (Horta et al 2007) of the reported lower rates of breastfeeding in landowning social classes (Moring 1998), but any such effects were evidently not related to crop yields. Finally, the likelihood of rye and barley yields being of nutritional importance can be further evaluated by considering the potential role of the cumulative effects of the two crop yields in an individual's year of birth.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food availability at birth limited reproductive success in historical humans

Rickard

Holopainen

Helama

et al. 2010

Ecology

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Environmental conditions in early life can profoundly affect individual development and have consequences for reproductive success. Limited food availability may be one of the reasons for this, but direct evidence linking variation in early-life nutrition to reproductive performance in adulthood in natural populations is sparse. We combined historical agricultural data with detailed demographic church records to investigate the effect of food availability around the time of birth on the reproductive success of 927 men and women born in 18th-century Finland. Our study population exhibits natural mortality and fertility rates typical of many preindustrial societies, and individuals experienced differing access to resources due to social stratification. We found that among both men and women born into landless families (i.e., with low access to resources), marital prospects, probability of reproduction, and offspring viability were all positively related to local crop yield during the birth year. Such effects were generally absent among those born into landowning families. Among landless individuals born when yields of the two main crops, rye and barley, were both below median, only 50% of adult males and 55% of adult females gained any reproductive success in their lifetime, whereas 97% and 95% of those born when both yields were above the median did so. Our results suggest that maternal investment in offspring in prenatal or early postnatal life may have profound implications for the evolutionary fitness of human offspring, particularly among those for which resources are more limiting. Our study adds support to the idea that early nutrition can limit reproductive success in natural animal populations, and provides the most direct evidence to date that this process applies to humans.

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“…Adult mortality tended to be highest in spring, whereas infant mortality peaked during the summer months (Turpeinen 1979; Lummaa et al . 1998b; Moring 1998). During the study era seasonal variation in food conditions and mortality was smallest in south‐west Finland (coast and archipelago of Åland and Åboland), probably as a consequence of milder winters in these areas and an opportunity for a multiple‐pursuit economic system where farming was accompanied by fishing, hunting and animal husbandry (Soininen 1974).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender difference in benefits of twinning in pre‐industrial humans: boys did not pay

Lummaa

Jokela

Haukioja

2001

Journal of Animal Ecology

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Summary 1.We studied how differences in the cost of producing male and female offspring in humans affected the productivity of twin vs. singleton deliveries in two ecologically different areas of pre-industrial (1752-1850) Finland. Given the higher energy requirements of male infants, we predicted sons to suffer more from increased litter size and food scarcity than daughters. 2. We found that the number of offspring surviving to adulthood from a twin delivery differed between the archipelago and mainland areas of rural Finland. On the mainland areas, where crop failures and subsequent famines were common throughout the centuries, twin deliveries were much less successful than in the south-west archipelago, where food conditions were traditionally more stable and survival was ensured by fishing. 3. Productivity of twin deliveries was modified by the gender composition of the twins; female-female twin births were generally most successful and male-male births least successful. 4. On the mainland, giving birth to twins of any gender composition never increased the mothers' reproductive success beyond giving birth to either a male or female singleton, whereas in the archipelago mothers could increase their reproductive output by producing twins. This was because in the archipelago female-female twin deliveries contributed on average more than one adult offspring to the breeding population, whereas a singleton delivery of either gender produced only about 0·7 adults. 5. Our results show that increases in litter size and variability of food conditions increased male mortality. High female twin survival in the archipelago led to higher fitness of twinning mothers in relation to mothers with only singletons. Twinning has traditionally been significantly more common in the archipelago as compared to the mainland, but contrary to the prediction, there were no apparent differences in the frequency of male-male and female-female twins being born.

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Motherhood, Milk, and Money. Infant Mortality in Pre-Industrial Finland

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

Influence of early-life nutrition on mortality and reproductive success during a subsequent famine in a preindustrial population

Influence of early-life nutrition on mortality and reproductive success during a subsequent famine in a preindustrial population

Food availability at birth limited reproductive success in historical humans

Gender difference in benefits of twinning in pre‐industrial humans: boys did not pay

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