ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
An integrative skeletal and paleogenomic analysis of stature variation suggests relatively reduced health for early European farmers.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ancient DNA and Human Physiology.Physiology (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Review
- Article
- Insights into human adaptation from ancient DNA.Nature genetics · 2026Review
- The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Dietary inequality marker reveals 10,000 years of gender and cultural disparity in Europe.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Autosomal ancestry and male founder events explain variation in male height across 60 Caucasian populations.Human genomics · 2026Article
- Editorial: Human health affected by changing ecological environment in the rapid urbanization.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Polygenic prediction of human complex traits using ancient DNA.Current opinion in genetics & development · 2025Review
- The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid ancient human admixture.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The genomic history of East Asian Middle Neolithic millet- and rice-agricultural populations.Cell genomics · 2025Article
- Childhood skeletal lesions common in prehistory are present in living forager-farmers and predict adult markers of immune function.Science advances · 2025Article
- Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples.American journal of human genetics · 2025Article
- Contemporary small-scale subsistence populations offer unique insights into human musculoskeletal health and aging.Science advances · 2024Review
- Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Fast and Accurate Estimation of Selection Coefficients and Allele Histories from Ancient and Modern DNA.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Socio-cultural practices may have affected sex differences in stature in Early Neolithic Europe.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
- Infantile scurvy as a consequence of agricultural intensification in the 1st millennium BCE Etruria Campana.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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Abstract
Human culture, biology, and health were shaped dramatically by the onset of agriculture ∼12,000 y B.P. This shift is hypothesized to have resulted in increased individual fitness and population growth as evidenced by archaeological and population genomic data alongside a decline in physiological health as inferred from skeletal remains. Here, we consider osteological and ancient DNA data from the same prehistoric individuals to study human stature variation as a proxy for health across a transition to agriculture. Specifically, we compared “predicted” genetic contributions to height from paleogenomic data and “achieved” adult osteological height estimated from long bone measurements for 167 individuals across Europe spanning the Upper Paleolithic to Iron Age (∼38,000 to 2,400 B.P.). We found that individuals from the Neolithic were shorter than expected (given their individual polygenic height scores) by an average of −3.82 cm relative to individuals from the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic (P = 0.040) and −2.21 cm shorter relative to post-Neolithic individuals (P = 0.068), with osteological vs. expected stature steadily increasing across the Copper (+1.95 cm relative to the Neolithic), Bronze (+2.70 cm), and Iron (+3.27 cm) Ages. These results were attenuated when we additionally accounted for genome-wide genetic ancestry variation: for example, with Neolithic individuals −2.82 cm shorter than expected on average relative to pre-Neolithic individuals (P = 0.120). We also incorporated observations of paleopathological indicators of nonspecific stress that can persist from childhood to adulthood in skeletal remains into our model. Overall, our work highlights the potential of integrating disparate datasets to explore proxies of health in prehistory.
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