Project description
How life transforms our bones
Humans have transitioned from mobile hunter-gatherers to farmers and, most recently, to city dwellers. The world’s urban population has increased rapidly since the 1950s, from 751 million to more than 4 billion today. In fact, more than half of the world population now lives in urban areas. In this context, the EU-funded TRANSITIONS project will study and provide advanced training on and develop approaches to interpreting skeletal differences in the context of hunter-gatherers, farmers and urban dwellers. The findings will shed new light on how different lifestyles affect skeletal form. This is of importance in understanding the lives of past peoples and how best to maintain skeletal health in our rapidly urbanising world.
Objective
In the last 10 millennia humans have changed the way we live, moving from mobile hunter-gathering to farming and the urban living we are most familiar with today. Since 2008 more than 50% of the global population live in cities. But what effect has this had on our bodies? Understanding how we have adapted to past transitions is vital to interpreting archaeological remains and to anticipate the physical effects of this ongoing modern transition to a highly technologically dependent urban species. The goal of TRANSITIONS is to develop the research capacities of the European Fellow, in his broad area of interest in human variation and evolution. It will provide advanced training in the context and study of the skeletal consequences of changes in lifestyle and activity through a series of defined objectives for resaerch and training that compare skeletal form and function within and between past populations with different subsistence and lifestyle strategies; hunter gatherers, agriculturalists and urban dwellers. The results will provide new insights into how different lifestyles and their functional consequences affect skeletal form. Multiple factors impact on the skeleton, yet there is a discernible, consistent trend with increasing modernity towards ‘gracilization’. Thus, despite the multifactorial causes, to what extent are skeletal effects similar or different between transitions to agriculture and to urban or other ways of life? The answer will reflect how flexible our responses are to similar and different pressures and the extent to which we can use knowledge of historical transitions to interpret archaeological material and anticipate current and future ones. As well as providing advanced training by applying cutting-edge techniques, The ER will be supervised and trained in broader aspects of academic activity, knowledge transfer and career development, enabling him to position himself as a potential research leader.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
YO10 5DD York North Yorkshire
United Kingdom