ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
A global carbon and nitrogen isotope perspective on modern and ancient human diet.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Livelihood and Dietary Transitions in Subsistence Populations of Northern Laos: Insights From Carbon and Nitrogen Stable Isotope Analysis.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Harnessing archaeogenetic for cancer therapy: bridging ancient DNA insights with modern therapeutic innovations.Clinical epigenetics · 2026Review
- Fifteen thousand years of bioarchaeological data reveal life history trade-offs among Europe's first farmers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The nitrogen isotopic composition of biotic components in Northern Biscayne Bay and Associated Waterways, South Florida USA: implications for sources of nitrogen.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2026Article
- Isotopic evidence for human adaptation to island environments in the Canary Islands during the Amazigh period.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Carbon and Nitrogen Isotope Composition of Australasian Hair and Fingernails in a Global Context.Rapid communications in mass spectrometry : RCM · 2025Article
- A dataset of scientific dates from archaeological sites in eastern Africa spanning 5000 BCE to 1800 CE.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Food Globalization in the Early Modern Period: Isotopic Evidence of Maize Introduction and Dietary Diversification on Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain (16th-18th CE).American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Human dietary diversity in the Colombian Andes at the terminal Pleistocene-late Holocene sites Tequendama and Aguazuque.iScience · 2025Article
- Enhancing the contemporary human and water isotope reference database for the Netherlands: New insights from Sr-O-C-N-H isotope data.iScience · 2024Article
- Human diet of premodern mainland Japan: a meta-analysis of carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios.Anthropological science : journal of the Anthropological Society of Nippon = Jinruigaku zasshi · 2024Article
- Astaxanthin Bioactivity Is Determined by Stereoisomer Composition and Extraction Method.Nutrients · 2022Review
- A bioavailable strontium (87Sr/86Sr) isoscape for Aotearoa New Zealand: Implications for food forensics and biosecurity.PloS one · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses are widely used to infer diet and mobility in ancient and modern human populations, potentially providing a means to situate humans in global food webs. We collated 13,666 globally distributed analyses of ancient and modern human collagen and keratin samples. We converted all data to a common "Modern Diet Equivalent" reference frame to enable direct comparison among modern human diets, human diets prior to the advent of industrial agriculture, and the natural environment. This approach reveals a broad diet prior to industrialized agriculture and continued in modern subsistence populations, consistent with the human ability to consume opportunistically as extreme omnivores within complex natural food webs and across multiple trophic levels in every terrestrial and many marine ecosystems on the planet. In stark contrast, isotope dietary breadth across modern nonsubsistence populations has compressed by two-thirds as a result of the rise of industrialized agriculture and animal husbandry practices and the globalization of food distribution networks.
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