What Can Bones Reveal About Humans?

What Can Bones Reveal About Humans? In the article “Ancient Genes and Modern Health,” authors S. Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konnor reveal the diet of Paleolithic ancestors, nutritional variations that accompanied the advancement of agriculture, and common illnesses that were frequent in the West but not in hunter-gatherers. As anthropologists have discovered much evidence that early humans were once primarily scavengers and gatherers of plants, much valuable information can be revealed about early history. Based on their studies, anthropologist firmly believe that the methods of producing and gathering food have considerably influenced historical changes. In their article, S. Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner explain how information collected from paleoanthropology
After examining skeletal remains from nearly 30,000 years ago, paleontologists have been able to determine that humans were most likely tall, and their skeletal stature may reveal a variety of nutritional dynamics. Due to the development of agriculture, the intake of animal proteins most likely declined and contributed to the decline of the average height of humans. Furthermore, paleontologists were able to discover that the “strontium/calcium rations in the bones of humans who lived just before and during the changeover to agriculture confirm that the consumption of meat declined relative to that of vegetable foods around this period” (Eaton and Konner 74). Furthermore, skeletal remains have also revealed much about muscularity as it has been discovered that the average preagricultural human was generally stronger than humans
Based on their studies, anthropologists have learned that technology such as the bow and arrow significantly helped hunters search for food, and hunter-gatherers generally consumed nearly twice as many vegetables as meats. In addition to using anthropology to study our ancestors, epidemiology, the study of disease patterns, has provided us with much beneficial information as epidemiological investigations often help figure out the kinds of diseases might have impacted Paleolithic humans. Because illnesses such as emphysema, hypertension, and lung cancer commonly impact older people, it is highly likely that Paleolithic humans did not even have the opportunity to contract these diseases because they had substantially shorter life expectancies. Nutritional science has also helped anthropologists evaluate how Paleolithics lived as It delivers an analysis of the foods they were likely to consume. Although it is often highly challenging to gather information, analyzing “wild, uncultivated fruits, vegetables, and nuts eaten by recent hunter-gatherers allow us to estimate the average nutritional values of the plant foods our ancestors ate” (Eaton and Konner