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Evidence for a reduction in stature between Mesolithic foragers and Neolithic farmers has been interpreted as reflective of declines in health, however, our current understanding of this trend fails to account for the complexity of cultural and dietary transitions or the possible causes of phenotypic change. The agricultural transition was extended in primary centers of domestication and abrupt in regions characterized by demic diffusion. In regions such as Northern Europe where foreign domesticates were difficult to establish, there is strong evidence for natural selection for lactase persistence in relation to dairying. We employ broad-scale analyses of diachronic variation in stature and body mass in the Levant, Europe, the Nile Valley, South Asia, and China, to test three hypotheses about the timing of subsistence shifts and human body size, that: 1) the adoption of agriculture led to a decrease in stature, 2) there were different trajectories in regions of in situ domestication or cultural diffusion of agriculture; and 3) increases in stature and body mass are observed in regions with evidence for selection for lactase persistence. Our results demonstrate that 1) decreases in stature preceded the origins of agriculture in some regions; 2) the Levant and China, regions of in situ domestication of species and an extended period of mixed foraging and agricultural subsistence, had stable stature and body mass over time; and 3) stature and body mass increases in Central and Northern Europe coincide with the timing of selective sweeps for lactase persistence, providing support for the “Lactase Growth Hypothesis.”

 

Humanity’s relationship with the environment during the Holocene, and into the Anthropocene, is structured around our dependance on agricultural production, which has resulted in risk mitigation strategies that include intensive landscape modifications, among other tactics. However, to understand broader patterns of human resilience and the shifts in human/environment relationships, we need to look further back in time. Through this paper, we explore cultural strategies of risk management and resilience in pre-Holocene communities and how these practices allowed hunter-gatherer communities to adapt to a changing environment. For over 1000 years, the Epipalaeolithic site of Kharaneh IV was a focal point on the landscape for hunter-gatherer groups, acting as an aggregation site for Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic peoples. Located in the eastern desert of Jordan, at the time of occupation the site was a lush wetland surrounded by a rich grassland environment, providing abundant food and other resources for the site’s occupants. However, over time the wetland began to dry up and by 18,600 cal BP Kharaneh IV was abandoned. In this paper, we discuss the final occupation of Kharaneh IV, linking the site’s abandonment to the increasing aridification of eastern Jordan. Environmental change led to the eventual abandonment of Kharaneh IV and other nearby sites, as people relocated within the Azraq Basin in search of new water resources during the Holocene. Flexible technological strategies and knowledge of the landscape created resilient cultural practices that allowed these communities to use population movement as a risk management strategy.

 

The archaeology of hunter-gatherers has much to tell us about how humans engaged with the world around them in complex and knowledgeable ways throughout prehistory. The advent of agriculture, often seen as a monolithic and monumentally new way of life, is used as a cultural and chronological marker for when humans began to have notable and lasting impacts on the environment. Some archaeologists suggest that the far-reaching and widespread effects of farming on local habitats, from landscape clearance to the domestication of plants and animals, should mark the beginning of the Anthropocene. Here, I explore some of the ways that we can approach and detect human-environment dynamics among prehistoric hunter-gatherers, using case studies from Southwest Asia and Japan, to explore the transformation of landscapes into social places that a) represent an early expression of behaviors thought to be novel to or typify a ‘Neolithic way of life’ and b) have remained detectable in the archaeological record for the last 20 000 years. These landscape practices highlight that the focus on ‘Neolithization’ is somewhat misleading as they were enacted within a hunter-gatherer world and worldview.