We're all getting smaller and our brains are shrinking...

[Ponce]

Well, that could be true........the older that I get the more that PART of my body keeps on shrinking :(
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We're all getting smaller and our brains are shrinking... is farming to blame?
By Fiona Macrae

Last updated at 1:09 AM on 13th June 2011


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Having conquered Everest and landed on the Moon, it is tempting to think we are bigger and better than our ancestors.

But on a purely physical basis, it seems, we just don’t measure up. Mankind is actually shrinking.

Cambridge University experts say humans are past their peak and that modern-day people are 10 per cent smaller and shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Scientists blame agriculture, with restricted diets and urbanisation compromising health and leading to the spread of disease
And if that’s not depressing enough, our brains are also smaller.
The findings reverse perceived wisdom that humans have grown taller and larger, a belief which has grown from data on more recent physical development.

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The decline, say scientists, has happened over the past 10,000 years. They blame agriculture, with restricted diets and urbanisation compromising health and leading to the spread of disease.

The theory has emerged from studies of fossilised human remains found in Africa, Europe and Asia.

Big brother: A model of neanderthal man, which rose to prominence about 130,000 years and was far more robust that modern man
Easy life: Human beings have have shrunk ten per cent in the 10,000 years since the advent of farming
The earliest, from Ethiopia, date back 200,000 years, and were larger and ‘more robust’ than their modern-day counterparts, said Dr Marta Lahr, an expert in human evolution.

Fossils found in Israeli caves and dating from 120,000 to 100,000 years ago, reveal a people who were tall and muscular, a pattern that continued uninterrupted until relatively recent times.

An average person 10,000 years ago weighed between 12st 8lb and 13st 6lb. Today, the average is between 11st and 12st 8lb. Dr Lahr, who last week presented her findings to the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific body, described the changes as ‘striking’.
Bigger brain: Six different views of a 160,000-year-old human skull of an adult male from Ethiopia
‘We can see that humans have continually evolved but in body size it is not until the last 10,000 years that they have changed substantially, so the question is why this should have happened.’
The timing points to the switch from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, which began 9,000 years ago. While farming would have made food plentiful, focussing on a smaller number of foodstuffs could have caused vitamin and mineral deficiencies that stunted growth.

In China, early farmers relied on cereals such as buckwheat, rice and maize, all of which lack niacin, a B vitamin vital for growth.
However, the rise of agriculture does not explain why brains are also shrinking.

The male brain of 20,000 years ago measured 1,500 cubic centimetres. Modern man’s brain averages just 1,350 cubic cm – a decrease equivalent to the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.

It doesn’t mean we are less intelligent – rather we have learnt to make the best use of our resources.

Dr Lahr said: ‘Over evolutionary time there would have been huge energy savings in making the brain smaller but more efficient – as we see today with computer processors.’

Robert Foley, a Cambridge University professor of human evolution, said: ‘Becoming human, in an evolutionary sense, is a continuous and gradual process. Our species, rather than being a fixed entity, is more like a piece of putty, changing shape and dimensions all the time.’


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2002684/Were-getting-smaller-brains-shrinking--farming-blame.html#ixzz1P6mQLGXG

[Glass]

I wonder if they will "discover" that mans lifespans have also been falling since that time as well?

[mrnhtbr2232]

Moore's Law meets anthropology - getting on the bus will have a whole new meaning one of these days when they plug in the diagnostic harness. From Australopithecus with a tiny brain to homo sapiens with meat-protein body mass evolving to smaller brains that have their transmission maps now known: http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org.

The Borg is not so laughable when you consider things like electrodes in the thalamus rigged to external systems are already reality for treating seizures. A slippery slope to be sure - shaping the future of man with integrated digital implants like a rack check at the local GM dealer. Evolution indeed.

[Ponce]

Unless the whole human race dies it will adapt itself to new situations......like what is happening right now with the Zionist taking over the US.........."Life is not what it gives you, but what you take from it"... Ponce.........or what you make of it.

[keehah]

Perhaps it was because civilization carried the sociopathic and psychopathic?
(I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not)

"http://www.livescience.com/13083-criminals-brain-neuroscience-ethics.html" (http://www.livescience.com/13083-criminals-brain-neuroscience-ethics.html)

In one recent study, scientists examined 21 people with antisocial personality disorder – a condition that characterizes many convicted criminals. Those with the disorder "typically have no regard for right and wrong. They may often violate the law and the rights of others," according to the Mayo Clinic.

Brain scans of the antisocial people, compared with a control group of individuals without any mental disorders, showed on average an 18-percent reduction in the volume of the brain's middle frontal gyrus, and a 9 percent reduction in the volume of the orbital frontal gyrus – two sections in the brain's frontal lobe.

Another brain study, published in the September 2009 Archives of General Psychiatry, compared 27 psychopaths — people with severe antisocial personality disorder — to 32 non-psychopaths. In the psychopaths, the researchers observed deformations in another part of the brain called the amygdala, with the psychopaths showing a thinning of the outer layer of that region called the cortex and, on average, an 18-percent volume reduction in this part of brain.

"The amygdala is the seat of emotion. Psychopaths lack emotion. They lack empathy, remorse, guilt," said research team member Adrian Raine, chair of the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., last month.

[Son-of-Liberty]

You could probably get back most of the robustness and brain size by eating a home grown Paleo diet before (both mother and father) and during pregnancy and then feeding your kids the same. That is what we are going to do.

Epigenetics:

In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of changes produced in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence –hence the name epi- (Greek: επί- over, above) -genetics. Examples of such changes might be DNA methylation or histone acetylation, both of which serve to suppress gene expression without altering the sequence of the silenced genes.

These changes may remain through cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life and may also last for multiple generations. However, there is no change in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;[1] instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.[2]

[ShortJohnSilver]

Did they adjust for race? I thought that different races had different brain volumes, no?

[horseshoe3]

I don't think brain size has much to do with intelligence. A "refined head" in a horse means a small head. And the animal is much more likely to be intelligent.

Border collies, poodles and australian sheperds have tiny heads and are by far the most intelligent of dogs.

When it comes to humans, a one word answer tells you all you need to know: BLOCKHEAD

[Horn]

Perhaps it was because civilization carried the sociopathic and psychopathic?
(I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not)

"http://www.livescience.com/13083-criminals-brain-neuroscience-ethics.html" (http://www.livescience.com/13083-criminals-brain-neuroscience-ethics.html)

Are you suggesting civilization is socipathic for doing so?

[Santa]

I thought mans intelligence was measured by the distance between the tip of his pinky finger and the tip of his thumb... ::)

[iOWNme]

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics would agree.....

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermodynamics.html

[Neuro]

Our brains consist mainly of fat and proteins, and uses carbohydrates as fuel. So the carbohydrate rich diet of the last 10.000 years, is most likely the reason for smaller brains. It can function more efficiently with sufficient fuel...

Another interesting thing is that size does matter. In a highly competitive environment, life and death situations animals larger than aproximately 1 kg grows larger, while animals smaller than one kg tends to grow smaller, in a non competitive environment animals tends to grow towards the 1 kg cut off...

Thirdly civilisation in itself, could actually favour more stupid and weaker individuals, through welfare systems, smaller hunter gatherer tribes could not afford to feed weak and stupid people. When I was a kid I climbed a mountain in the North of Sweden in Lapland, samic country, and I was told that when elderly and or otherwise permanently incapacitated not where able to follow the movement of the reindeer themselves, they were expected to make the final journey, probably with the aid of their friends and family, up to this mountain, and threw themselves off the peak. This may have been ongoing until the beginning of the 20th Century... But without this tradition, they would have held up the entire tribe, and risked the survival of it too...

[osoab]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cUNNKzj_Nc


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEnKLhi83J8&feature=related

[lapis]

We're all getting smaller and our brains are shrinking... is farming to blame?

Probably!

The alternative news site SOTT.net (Signs of the Times) commented on the article:

The Devastating Effects of Agriculture: We're Getting Shorter NOT Taller and Our Brains are Shrinking, So is Farming to Blame? (http://www.sott.net/articles/show/229880-The-Devastating-Effects-of-Agriculture-We-re-Getting-Shorter-NOT-Taller-and-Our-Brains-are-Shrinking-So-is-Farming-to-Blame-)

They've also posted this interested article:

Agriculture: The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race (http://wwww.sott.net/articles/show/228452-Agriculture-The-Worst-Mistake-In-The-History-Of-The-Human-Race)

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution gradually spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly gazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so- called primitive people, like the Kalahari Bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors.

For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only twelve to nineteen hours for one group of Bushmen, fourteen hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and ninety-three grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat seventy-five or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modem hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts founds well preserved' mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.
[...]

One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
[...]
Compared to the hunter- gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. " I don't think most hunter-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity." says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor, with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.

Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth).

Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease. Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts-- with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies, for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New guinea farming communities today, I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 11 O-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modem hunter-gathers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Inuit and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus with the advent of agriculture an elite became better off but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls. One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 time that.)

Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by extended nursing and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmer didn't want.

At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space where trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day.

We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?