Project description
What ancient teeth reveal about motherhood
Throughout history, changes in diet and climate have altered how communities care for infants. Specifically, these changes affect how long mothers nurse and when they introduce new foods. The ERC-funded MOTHERS project aims to use children’s teeth as a biological archive. It will analyse the elements and isotopes found in dental enamel and dentine. These markers show exactly when an infant stopped breastfeeding and started eating solid food. The data also provide clues about the health and diet of the mother. The project will build models using data from people today and apply these to ancient remains in Croatia and Italy. The findings are expected to shed light on health during early life from the Stone Age to the first cities.
Objective
The intimate relationship between mother and infant, since the first moments after conception, contributed to shaping the evolution of our species and its behaviour. The mother-infant nexus changed through time adapting to environmental changes, new subsistence economies and social constraints.
Yet, how the biocultural transitions across human evolution influenced the mode and time of pregnancy and nursing of human infants is under-investigated. MOTHERS will use recently developed cutting edge methodologies of trace elemental and isotopic analyses in dental enamel and dentine to identify the change from an exclusive breast milk diet to one that includes non-milk foods and to assess the mothers diet and well being. Indeed, dietary behaviour, including that of the mother during pregnancy, deeply affects human growth and development from the earliest phases of ontogenesis and is chemically recorded in developing dental enamel. The goal of MOTHERS is to build consistent interpretative models, based on contemporary infants with controlled dietary and anamnestic history, to reconstruct health, diet, and growth trajectories in early life on an extensive collection of human dental specimens from the Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic, until urbanization, in Italy and Croatia. Also, the profound chemical differences in dental enamel between breastfed and herbivore milk/formula-fed children will allow the identification of the early use of non-human milk and shed light on the herbivore domestication and on alloparental care in past human populations.
This project adds value and competitiveness to the bioarchaeological research landscape in Europe. Not only will my project be of interest to a broad range of academics within the social sciences, but it can inform present-day public health policy measuring the effect of dietary shifts in childrens growth and development.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences health sciences nursing
- humanities history and archaeology history
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine obstetrics
- medical and health sciences health sciences nutrition
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2022-STG
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00185 Roma
Italy
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