Early Life Conditions and Physiological Stress following the Transition to Farming in Central/Southeast Europe: Skeletal Growth Impairment and 6000 Years of Gradual Recovery

Abstract

Early life conditions play an important role in determining adult body size. In particular, childhood malnutrition and disease can elicit growth delays and affect adult body size if severe or prolonged enough. In the earliest stages of farming, skeletal growth impairment and small adult body size are often documented relative to hunter-gatherer groups, though this pattern is regionally variable. In Central/Southeast Europe, it is unclear how early life stress, growth history, and adult body size were impacted by the introduction of agriculture and ensuing long-term demographic, social, and behavioral change. The current study assesses this impact through the reconstruction and analysis of mean stature, body mass, limb proportion indices, and sexual dimorphism among 407 skeletally mature men and women from foraging and farming populations spanning the Late Mesolithic through Early Medieval periods in Central/Southeast Europe (~7100 calBC to 850 AD). Results document significantly reduced mean stature, body mass, and crural index in Neolithic agriculturalists relative both to Late Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fishers and to later farming populations. This indication of relative growth impairment in the Neolithic, particularly among women, is supported by existing evidence of high developmental stress, intensive physical activity, and variable access to animal protein in these early agricultural populations. Among subsequent agriculturalists, temporal increases in mean stature, body mass, and crural index were more pronounced among Central European women, driving declines in the magnitude of sexual dimorphism through time. Overall, results suggest that the transition to agriculture in Central/Southeast Europe was challenging for early farming populations, but was followed by gradual amelioration across thousands of years, particularly among Central European women. This sex difference may be indicative, in part, of greater temporal variation in the social status afforded to young girls, in their access to resources during growth, and/or in their health status than was experienced by men.

Prehistoric women’s manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5500 years of farming in Central Europe

“…Important environmental influences include a combination of metabolic stress from factors such as malnutrition, poor health, and physiological stress ( 48 ) and from mechanical loading and its timing ( 49 ). There is some evidence of metabolic stress in the earliest stages of farming among these women ( 50 ) that improved through time, whereas the living women in the study were all healthy and had no history of major medical conditions, eating disorders, immobility, or medications known to affect bone. If dietary and health status affected the cortical thickness or endosteal contour of prehistoric women, then that would be undetectable using solid-section CSG properties derived solely from the periosteal contour and could be contributing slightly to the magnitude of differences between prehistoric and living women.…”

Life History Transitions at the Origins of Agriculture: A Model for Understanding How Niche Construction Impacts Human Growth, Demography and Health

“…However, many studies have shown that male offspring are more susceptible to malnutrition in early life (279), most likely because their faster growth rate makes them more sensitive to any constraints on energy supply. Of interest here, there is evidence for more significant body size shifts among men than women (220), which suggests that male offspring disproportionately picked up the signal of energetic stresses affecting adult women.…”

Human stature in the Near East and Europe ca. 10,000–1000 BC: its spatiotemporal development in a Bayesian errors-in-variables model

“…As the effect of this data is moderated in the models presented here, it appears questionable if the negative impact of Secondary Neolithization in Southeastern Europe on stature at ca. 6000 BC was indeed as sharp as signaled by unmodeled data (e.g., Macintosh et al 2016;Rosenstock and Scheibner 2018). Rather, some stature decrease already starts around ca.…”

“…Hence, long bone lengths or body heights estimated from them-a procedure for which a variety of formulas is available (for overviews, see, e.g., Rösing 1988;Moore and Ross 2013;Zeman et al 2014)-are the only universally available proxies for stature. Several studies have so far used long bone lengths or stature estimations to address early body height development for various regions, especially in Old World Archaeology (e.g., Angel 1984;Bennike 1985;Jaeger et al 1998;Koca Özer et al 2011;Siegmund 2010;Piontek and Vančata 2012;MacIntosh et al 2016). One first broader study on Central, Western, and Northern Europe has only appeared very recently , but leaves aside Southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, which are key areas for many prehistoric socioeconomic developments.…”

“…Moreover, it tests the potential of Bayesian errors-in-variables modeling (Konigsberg and Frankenberg 2013;Groß 2016) as a new approach to overcome problems associated with the patchy distribution of data in space and time, as well as the often-inexact and fragmentary archaeological skeletal data. In many regions, only very few sites and individuals document certain periods: the skeletons from the Iron Gates region, for instance, represent the only Mesolithic dataset for the entire area of Southeastern Europe (Supplement 1) and consequently have a disproportionate influence on every study in this region (e.g., Macintosh et al 2016;Rosenstock and Scheibner 2018). Such effects can be alleviated by allowing preceding and subsequent data to contribute information on a certain region and period in a Bayesian approach.…”