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Fri 8 Aug, 2014 08:07 pm
A recent study shows that male skulls feminized about 50,000 years ago. Some vegetable crops, such as legumes, contain high amounts of "estrogen-mimic" chemical compounds. To what extent might feminization of male skull shapes have been influenced by eating legumes? Is it possible that people learned to plant seeds of plants they liked 50,000 years ago and, while untended, the plants would be there in greater abundance when they came back the next year? If human density was very low, less than 1 person per 50 square miles, there would have been no need to protect the crops. Towns would have started when human population densities increased, making it necessary to protect crops year round. In other words, the knowledge of how to plant crops occurred before permanent settlements. Feminization of male skulls may be the smoking gun for the start date of early, primitive agriculture.
@Mesquited,
I have no opinion at all on the "feminized" male skulls. However, there is little disagreement today among paleo-historians that
homo sapiens did some small-scale planting and cultivating long before the so-called agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia. You've described the probable process quite accurately: a nomadic people could well have planted specific crops in an area to which they knew they would be returning later in the year. Certain legumes, along with fruits and berries, could well have been among those crops. Grain planting would have come much later as it is far more labor-intensive.
@Lustig Andrei,
I agree--both about this "feminization" claptrap, and about the process. Jared Diamond describes how, in the contemporary world (end of the 20th century), tribes in PNG who effectively still live in a stone age culture move semi-nomadically within a range, planting crops (i believe he was referring to yams), then moving through their range to hunt and forage, finally returning to their "garden plots" in time to harvest them.
@Setanta,
The domestication of wild forest yams is still common practice in West Africa.
@Mesquited,
What characteristics of the skulls are considered "feminizing"?
Where did you read this?
@Mesquited,
It is obvious from that abstract that the authors--Cieri, Churchill, Franciscus, Tan and Hare--did not use any such term as "feminizing." You have inserted that term into the abstract, it does not appear there.
@Mesquited,
Thanks. That's a very interesting article. The minute I started reading it I thought of the Siberian Foxes and then they were mentioned right in the article.
It seems that human beings may have undergone a similar change in hormonal activity as the foxes did with adrenal activity. And along with it were associated behavioral and structural changes. Even more ironic that humans may have run into this effect through natural selection and then imposed a similar change on the foxes but through artificial selection.
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