ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Gradual decline in mobility with the adoption of food production in Europe.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 173 citations in OpenAlex.
- The utility of dried blood spot measurement of bone turnover markers in biological anthropology.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Pooled it
- Biomechanical evidence for occupational specialization in Mesolithic-Neolithic hunter-gatherers from Zvejnieki, Latvia.Science advances · 2026Article
- Cortical Bone Loss in Barcelona Across Time (1st Century CE-18th Century CE) and Its Potential Relationship With Linear Enamel Hypoplasia.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Coupling geometric morphometrics and machine learning for mandibular sex estimation in Late Pleistocene and Late Modern populations.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Bone health: Age-related changes in diaphyseal structural properties among European Holocene humans during the last 9000 years.Science advances · 2025Article
- Contemporary small-scale subsistence populations offer unique insights into human musculoskeletal health and aging.Science advances · 2024Review
- Evolutionary and functional analyses of LRP5 in archaic and extant modern humans.Human genomics · 2024Article
- Multiproxy bioarchaeological data reveals interplay between growth, diet and population dynamics across the transition to farming in the central Mediterranean.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Mandibular morphology and the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Westernmost Iberia.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A new method for sex estimation based on femoral cross-sectional geometry measurements and its validation using recent and ancient populations.International journal of legal medicine · 2023Article
- Take a load off: skeletal implications of sedentism in the feet of modern body donors.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
- Leveraging mice with diverse microbial exposures for advances in osteoimmunology.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2023Article
- Nutrition and Health in Human Evolution-Past to Present.Nutrients · 2022Review
- Ancient mitochondrial diversity reveals population homogeneity in Neolithic Greece and identifies population dynamics along the Danubian expansion axis.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Variation in cross-sectional indicator of femoral robusticity in Homo sapiens and Neandertals.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Effects of reduced mobility on trabecular bone density in captive big cats.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- How the evolution of air breathing shaped hippocampal function.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Variability and the form-function framework in evolutionary biomechanics and human locomotion.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Skeletal ageing in Virunga mountain gorillas.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Muscle force interacts with stature to influence functionally related polar second moments of area in the lower limb among adult women.American journal of physical anthropology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 7 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Increased sedentism during the Holocene has been proposed as a major cause of decreased skeletal robusticity (bone strength relative to body size) in modern humans. When and why declining mobility occurred has profound implications for reconstructing past population history and health, but it has proven difficult to characterize archaeologically. In this study we evaluate temporal trends in relative strength of the upper and lower limb bones in a sample of 1,842 individuals from across Europe extending from the Upper Paleolithic [11,000-33,000 calibrated years (Cal y) B.P.] through the 20th century. A large decline in anteroposterior bending strength of the femur and tibia occurs beginning in the Neolithic (∼ 4,000-7,000 Cal y B.P.) and continues through the Iron/Roman period (∼ 2,000 Cal y B.P.), with no subsequent directional change. Declines in mediolateral bending strength of the lower limb bones and strength of the humerus are much smaller and less consistent. Together these results strongly implicate declining mobility as the specific behavioral factor underlying these changes. Mobility levels first declined at the onset of food production, but the transition to a more sedentary lifestyle was gradual, extending through later agricultural intensification. This finding only partially supports models that tie increased sedentism to a relatively abrupt Neolithic Demographic Transition in Europe. The lack of subsequent change in relative bone strength indicates that increasing mechanization and urbanization had only relatively small effects on skeletal robusticity, suggesting that moderate changes in activity level are not sufficient stimuli for bone deposition or resorption.
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