Europe’s First Farmers May Have Been Shorter Than Expected

STATE COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA—According to a statement released by Pennsylvania State University, George H. Perry, Stephanie Marciniak, and an international team of researchers evaluated DNA samples and the long bones of people who lived in Europe between 38,000 and 2,400 years ago to look for possible negative health effects experienced by the first farmers of the Neolithic period. Marciniak explained that, while taking into account a person’s genetic ancestry as populations migrated across Europe, the switch from hunting and gathering to farming did not always result in loss of height, but in some parts of Europe, early farmers were about 1.5 inches shorter than their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Heights eventually increased, however, so that individuals who lived during the Iron Age were some 1.29 inches taller than Neolithic farmers. Marciniak said that additional data is needed to explore genetic variants associated with height and possible causes in the decrease of achieved height. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For more, go to "Europe's First Farmers."