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Were early humans stronger?

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Our ancestors, who had to hunt and gather their food before the invention of agriculture, were more physically active than we are. Their bones were much stronger, too. A new study shows that human skeletons today are much lighter and more fragile than those of our ancient ancestors. This is mainly a result of the invention of agriculture and a drop in our level of physical activity. In the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Cambridge and Penn State University analyzed X-ray images of thigh bones from modern humans, as well as those from humans who lived thousands of years ago. They compared these samples to bones from other primates, including orangutans. The femur, or thigh bone, is the longest and strongest bone in the human body. According to the researchers, after people stopped hunting for food and became involved in agriculture, a more sedentary lifestyle became the norm. This sedentary lifestyle led to more delicate, lighter, and weaker bones.

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“Contemporary humans live in a cultural and technological milieu incompatible with our evolutionary adaptations,” said study co-author Colin Shaw, Ph.D., a researcher with the University of Cambridge’s Phenotypic Adaptability, Variation, and Evolution research group, in a press statement. The researchers focused on the inside of the femoral head, which is the ball at the top of the femur that fits into the pelvis and forms the hip joint. The hip joint is a load-bearing joint, which means it is affected by wear and tear from everyday exercise. The team analyzed the bones of 229 individuals from various primate species and 59 individuals from four historical human populations. They looked at the bones of those who obtained food without being physically active, and of those who were foragers, meaning that they searched and hunted for their food. While human hunters from about 7,000 years ago had strong bones, similar to those of modern orangutans, farmers six generations later had much weaker bones. In fact, the ancient hunters’ bone mass was about 20 percent greater than the bone mass of the later farmers. “The morphological differences between the highly mobile foragers and relatively sedentary village agriculturalists clearly point to physical activity as a major determinant of bone mass in the hip joint,” the researchers concluded. Shaw said that in the past 50 to 100 years, there has been a major and potentially dangerous shift from physical activity for survival to a more sedentary lifestyle. The study emphasizes the importance of physical exercise for bone health, in particular skeletal loading. “Sitting in a car or in front of a desk is not what we have evolved to do,” said Shaw.

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What was the first human to wear clothes?

The earliest possible evidence for clothing in ancient humans is stone tools found at archaeological sites like Gran Dolina in the Spanish Atapuerca Mountains (associated with Homo antecessor and dated to around 780,000 years ago), or in Schöningen in Germany (Homo heidelbergensis, around 400,000 years ago), which may ...

sciencefocus.com - When did humans first start wearing clothes? | BBC Science Focus ...

To expand into the cold hinterlands of Europe and Asia, our ancestors needed to keep warm. The earliest possible evidence for clothing in ancient humans is stone tools found at archaeological sites like Gran Dolina in the Spanish Atapuerca Mountains (associated with Homo antecessor and dated to around 780,000 years ago), or in Schöningen in Germany (Homo heidelbergensis, around 400,000 years ago), which may have been used to prepare animal hides. We see clearer evidence from the Neanderthals, who lived as far back as 400,000 years ago: the pattern of musculature on Neanderthal arms suggests that they habitually carried out tasks like hide preparation. Despite having bodies that were more cold-adapted than ours, a 2012 study estimated that Neanderthals may have needed to cover up to 80 per cent of their bodies to survive the harsh winters. In modern humans, (Homo sapiens), the adoption of clothing may have left its traces on some hangers-on: a 2011 study suggested that clothing lice began to genetically diverge from human head lice around 170,000 years ago, proposing a date for when we started to wear clothes. During winter, we probably needed to cover as much as 90 per cent of the body, which may be why we developed more modern-looking clothing than the fur cloaks that Neanderthals are suggested to have worn. By around 40,000 years ago, we were using needles and awls, made out of bone and stone, to create sewn, fitted clothes to keep us warm.