ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Genetic contributions to variation in human stature in prehistoric Europe.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ancient DNA and Human Physiology.Physiology (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Review
- Autosomal ancestry and male founder events explain variation in male height across 60 Caucasian populations.Human genomics · 2026Article
- Polygenic prediction of human complex traits using ancient DNA.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2025Review
- Forensic skeletal and molecular anthropology face to face: Combining expertise for identification of human remains.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Predicting the direction of phenotypic difference.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples.American journal of human genetics · 2025Article
- An ancient regulatory variant of ACSF3 influences the coevolution of increased human height and basal metabolic rate via metabolic homeostasis.Cell genomics · 2025Article
- A Litmus Test for Confounding in Polygenic Scores.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Ancestral genetic components are consistently associated with the complex trait landscape in European biobanks.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2024Article
- Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Human population dynamics in Upper Paleolithic Europe inferred from fossil dental phenotypes.Science advances · 2024Article
- Genomic imputation of ancient Asian populations contrasts local adaptation in pre- and post-agricultural Japan.iScience · 2024Article
- Socio-cultural practices may have affected sex differences in stature in Early Neolithic Europe.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Differences between male and female height in Early Neolithic Europe are likely to have been driven by culture.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Reverse-engineering the Venus figurines: An eco-life-course hypothesis for the aetiology of obesity in the Palaeolithic.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Review
- Article
- Multiproxy bioarchaeological data reveals interplay between growth, diet and population dynamics across the transition to farming in the central Mediterranean.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Trends in women's height and the effect of early childbearing on height retardation: An analysis of the height of Bangladeshi women born between 1974 and 1998.Journal of global health · 2023Article
- 15 years of GWAS discovery: Realizing the promise.American journal of human genetics · 2023Review
- Long-term trends in human body size track regional variation in subsistence transitions and growth acceleration linked to dairying.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The relative contributions of genetics and environment to temporal and geographic variation in human height remain largely unknown. Ancient DNA has identified changes in genetic ancestry over time, but it is not clear whether those changes in ancestry are associated with changes in height. Here, we directly test whether changes over the past 38,000 y in European height predicted using DNA from 1,071 ancient individuals are consistent with changes observed in 1,159 skeletal remains from comparable populations. We show that the observed decrease in height between the Early Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic is qualitatively predicted by genetics. Similarly, both skeletal and genetic height remained constant between the Mesolithic and Neolithic and increased between the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Sitting height changes much less than standing height-consistent with genetic predictions-although genetics predicts a small post-Neolithic increase that is not observed in skeletal remains. Geographic variation in stature is also qualitatively consistent with genetic predictions, particularly with respect to latitude. Finally, we hypothesize that an observed decrease in genetic heel bone mineral density in the Neolithic reflects adaptation to the decreased mobility indicated by decreased femoral bending strength. This study provides a model for interpreting phenotypic changes predicted from ancient DNA and demonstrates how they can be combined with phenotypic measurements to understand the relative contribution of genetic and developmentally plastic responses to environmental change.
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