“This study does a great job of showing that our immune system has continued to evolve in response to pathogen pressure.” ScienceMagArchives
When early farmers of the Vinca culture first sowed barley and wheat 7700 years ago in the rich soil of the Danube River and its tributaries, they changed more than their diet: They introduced a new way of life to the region. They crowded together in mud huts, living cheek by rump with aurochs, cows, pigs, and goats—and their poop—in settlements that eventually swelled to thousands of people.
Researchers have long suspected that early farmers got sick more often than nomadic hunter-gatherers. Studies suggest farmers in large Neolithic sites such as Çatalhöyük in Turkey faced a flurry of new zoonotic diseases such as influenza and salmonella, as well as new animal-borne strains of diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.
In the new study, the team used those results to come up with what’s called a polygenic risk score that predicts the strength of the inflammatory response in the face of specific diseases, based on an individual’s immune gene variants. The researchers then applied their technique to the past: From existing databases they downloaded ancient DNA sequences from 827 remains found across Europe, including Vinca farmers from today’s Romania.
The study is exciting because it clearly shows that the population frequencies of genes regulating inflammation “change strongly from the beginning of the Neolithic,” says molecular anthropologist Ben Krause-Kyora of Kiel University.
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