Stature and robusticity during the agricultural transition: Evidence from the bioarchaeological record

Mummert, Amanda; Esche, Emily; Robinson, Joshua J.; Armelagos, George J.

doi:10.1016/j.ehb.2011.03.004

Cited by 148 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 70 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The earliest human subsistence farmers faced severe physiological challenges (40,41), in part because plant-based agricultural diets provided more carbohydrates and less protein than the lean game that dominated diets of ancestral huntergatherers (31). Modern humans appear to retain these "outdated" nutritional adaptations, regulating the intake of protein more strongly than carbohydrates, and thus overeating sugars, starch, and lipids to reach set targets for protein consumption when navigating today's nutritional landscape that has become even more biased toward carbohydrates (42).…”

Section: Remarkable Parallels With the Challenges Of Human Subsistencementioning

confidence: 99%

Nutrition mediates the expression of cultivar–farmer conflict in a fungus-growing ant

Shik

Gomez

Kooij

et al. 2016

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Attine ants evolved farming 55-60 My before humans. Although evolutionarily derived leafcutter ants achieved industrial-scale farming, extant species from basal attine genera continue to farm loosely domesticated fungal cultivars capable of pursuing independent reproductive interests. We used feeding experiments with the basal attine Mycocepurus smithii to test whether reproductive allocation conflicts between farmers and cultivars constrain crop yield, possibly explaining why their mutualism has remained limited in scale and productivity. Stoichiometric and geometric framework approaches showed that carbohydrate-rich substrates maximize growth of both edible hyphae and inedible mushrooms, but that modest protein provisioning can suppress mushroom formation. Worker foraging was consistent with maximizing long-term cultivar performance: ant farmers could neither increase carbohydrate provisioning without cultivars allocating the excess toward mushroom production, nor increase protein provisioning without compromising somatic cultivar growth. Our results confirm that phylogenetically basal attine farming has been very successful over evolutionary time, but that unresolved host-symbiont conflict may have precluded these wildtype symbioses from rising to ecological dominance. That status was achieved by the evolutionarily derived leafcutter ants following full domestication of a coevolving cultivar 30-35 Mya after the first attine ants committed to farming. social evolution | crop domestication | symbiosis | geometric framework | Mycocepurus smithii

show abstract

Section: Remarkable Parallels With the Challenges Of Human Subsistencementioning

confidence: 99%

Nutrition mediates the expression of cultivar–farmer conflict in a fungus-growing ant

Shik

Gomez

Kooij

et al. 2016

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The costs include the extra labor needed to prepare compost (Burd and Howard 2005), protect cultivated gardens from pests (Bass and Cherrett 1994;Poulsen et al 2002;Currie et al 2003;Rodrigues et al 2008;Fernández-Marín et al 2009;Yek et al 2012), and maintain microclimates that promote fungal growth (Mueller et al 2005;Roces 2007, 2010). The earliest attines likely also incurred nutritional costs because switching from insect prey to fungi increased nutritional differences between consumer and food (Sterner and Elser 2002), paralleling the general de-cline in health when humans transitioned to agriculture some 10,000 years ago (Mummert et al 2011). We explore the energetic and demographic consequences of the farming transition in the descendants of these early ant farmers, a clade of lower attines that inhabit small colony-farms with around 100 workers and rely on insect biomass (carcasses and frass) for garden compost, measuring CO 2 emission rates (hereafter, metabolic rate) and colony composition (e.g., relative mass of adult workers).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metabolism and the Rise of Fungus Cultivation by Ants

Shik

Santos

Seal

et al. 2014

The American Naturalist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. abstract: Most ant colonies are comprised of workers that cooperate to harvest resources and feed developing larvae. Around 50 million years ago (MYA), ants of the attine lineage adopted an alternative strategy, harvesting resources used as compost to produce fungal gardens. While fungus cultivation is considered a major breakthrough in ant evolution, the associated ecological consequences remain poorly understood. Here, we compare the energetics of attine colony-farms and ancestral hunter-gatherer colonies using metabolic scaling principles within a phylogenetic context. We find two major energetic transitions. First, the earliest lower-attine farmers transitioned to lower mass-specific metabolic rates while shifting significant fractions of biomass from ant tissue to fungus gardens. Second, a transition 20 MYA to specialized cultivars in the higher-attine clade was associated with increased colony metabolism (without changes in garden fungal content) and with metabolic scaling nearly identical to hypometry observed in hunter-gatherer ants, although only the hunter-gatherer slope was distinguishable from isometry. Based on these evolutionary transitions, we propose that shifting living-tissue storage from ants to fungal mutualists provided energetic storage advantages contributing to attine diversification and outline critical assumptions that, when tested, will help link metabolism, farming efficiency, and colony fitness.

show abstract

“…Increased levels of nutritional stress during the growth period can lead to short adult stature, a phenomenon which has been documented archaeologically in a geographically broad sample of populations transitioning to agriculture (Mummert et al 2011). In subadults, systemic stress that results from inadequate nutrition, infectious disease, and high levels of energy expenditure can be quantified with reference to growth velocity, which accounts for the relationship between growth and development by comparing individual subadult stature with estimations of age (Klaus, Tam 2009).…”

Section: Economic Inequality Through a Bioarchaeological Lensmentioning

confidence: 99%

Essential Tensions: A Framework for Exploring Inequality Through Mortuary Archaeology and Bioarchaeology

Quinn

Beck

2016

Open Archaeology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Research on the emergence of institutionalized inequality has traditionally maintained an analytical divide between lived institutions that affect daily life and performed institutions materialized in mortuary contexts. Here, we argue that convergence or divergence between lived and performed contexts reveals key aspects of past social organization. When combined, mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology provide a methodological framework well suited to evaluate the coherence or dissonance of such institutions. Three case studies from prehistoric Europe highlight how new insights gained by studying tension between institutions, identities and experiences across social dimensions can transform our understanding of the development of institutionalized inequality. "These squat buildings, constructed with huge boulders, are in fact very durable. This is obvious in the many abandoned villages where the houses have disappeared but the tombs are still standing. They are the symbols of the association of their builders with the village where they are situated, an unchanging association with an unchanging order. They are in this way the denial of the fluidity of Merina society and indeed of all the societies of the living. They are an assertion of an order where men are organized along clear-cut lines. In other words, they are the demonstration of what the Merina feels his society was and ought to be"(Bloch 1968:101, emphasis ours).

show abstract

Stature and robusticity during the agricultural transition: Evidence from the bioarchaeological record

Cited by 148 publications

References 70 publications

Nutrition mediates the expression of cultivar–farmer conflict in a fungus-growing ant

Nutrition mediates the expression of cultivar–farmer conflict in a fungus-growing ant

Metabolism and the Rise of Fungus Cultivation by Ants

Essential Tensions: A Framework for Exploring Inequality Through Mortuary Archaeology and Bioarchaeology

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About