Agriculture weakened us – study

HOMO SAPIENS developed agriculture 12,000 years ago, and one of the first things that Man did was to sit down and relax. We haven’t really stopped relaxing since – if the vastly weakened state of our bones is anything to go by.

A study by an international team of scientists has looked at the bones of primates and different human species through our genetic history, and found that the shift from being huntergatherers to farmers coincided with a dramatic shift in our bone density.

Early nomadic humans had bones similar to those of our ape cousins – strong and dense. Their potato-growing descendants, in contrast, had light bones unused to exercise and prone to conditions such as osteoporosis. This change seemed to occur quite quickly, around the time we developed agriculture.

‘‘Much to our surprise, throughout our deep past, we see that our human ancestors and relatives, who lived in natural settings, had very dense bones,’’ said Professor Brian Richmond, from George Washington University. ‘‘Even early members of our species, going back 20,000 years or so, had bone that was about as dense as that seen in other modern species. This density drastically drops off in more recent times, when we started to use agricultural tools to grow food and settle in one place.’’

The difference between industrial humans and their agricultural ancestors was smaller than the step change that occurred between nomadic and agricultural lifestyles. The authors of the study, published in the