Browsing by Author "Thomas, Mark G."
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- Bayesian inference of sex-specific mortality profiles and product yields from unsexed cattle zooarchaeological remainsPublication . Diekmann, Yoan; Gillis, Rosalind; Lu, Ziye; Rudzinski, Anna; Iorio, Maria De; Thomas, Mark G.Zooarchaeological age-at-death profiles for domesticated ruminants can be inferred from tooth eruption, replacement, and wear. These profiles contain important information on slaughter management and have been used informally to infer the goals of past husbandry strategies. In principle, sex-specific survival curves could inform on various productivity parameters, including herd growth rates and sustainability, milk and meat yields, macronutrient and calorie yields, and feed consumed. Knowledge of these parameter values would allow identification of differences in husbandry economics in different archaeological contexts. However, archaeological age-at-death profiles are rarely sex-specific and are often derived from small sample sizes. As such, challenges remain in inferring sex-specific survival curves using explicit models that account for sampling uncertainty. We present a Bayesian inference approach for inferring sex-specific survival curves from unsexed cattle zooarchaeological age-at-death profiles that can accommodate data from any combination of age class boundaries. Our approach relies on the assumption that asymmetric sex-specific slaughter leads to a change in sex ratio over time, which we inform from slaughter practices in modern unimproved cattle herds. By combining inferred sex-specific archaeological survival curves with ethnographic productivity data from modern unimproved cattle, we are able to estimate herd growth rate, milk and meat yields, macronutrient and calorie yields, and feed consumed per animal. We apply our approach to zooarchaeological age-at-death profiles previously proposed to prioritise milk or meat production and to a set of profiles from ten Neolithic sites located across Europe. We infer that there was scope for improvement in prehistoric slaughter management.
- Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in EuropePublication . Evershed, Richard P.; Davey Smith, George; Roffet-Salque, Mélanie; Timpson, Adrian; Diekmann, Yoan; Lyon, Matthew S.; Cramp, Lucy J. E.; Casanova, Emmanuelle; Smyth, Jessica; Whelton, Helen L.; Dunne, Julie; Brychova, Veronika; Šoberl, Lucija; Gerbault, Pascale; Gillis, Rosalind; Heyd, Volker; Johnson, Emily; Kendall, Iain; Manning, Katie; Marciniak, Arkadiusz; Outram, Alan K.; Vigne, Jean-Denis; Shennan, Stephen; Bevan, Andrew; Colledge, Sue; Allason-Jones, Lyndsay; Amkreutz, Luc; Anders, Alexandra; Arbogast, Rose-Marie; Bălăşescu, Adrian; Bánffy, Eszter; Barclay, Alistair; Behrens, Anja; Bogucki, Peter; Carrancho Alonso, Ángel; Carretero, José Miguel; Cavanagh, Nigel; Claßen, Erich; Collado Giraldo, Hipolito; Conrad, Matthias; Csengeri, Piroska; Czerniak, Lech; Dębiec, Maciej; Denaire, Anthony; Domboróczki, László; Donald, Christina; Ebert, Julia; Evans, Christopher; Francés-Negro, Marta; Gronenborn, Detlef; Haack, Fabian; Halle, Matthias; Hamon, Caroline; Hülshoff, Roman; Ilett, Michael; Iriarte, Eneko; Jakucs, János; Jeunesse, Christian; Johnson, Melanie; Jones, Andy M.; Karul, Necmi; Kiosak, Dmytro; Kotova, Nadezhda; Krause, Rüdiger; Kretschmer, Saskia; Krüger, Marta; Lefranc, Philippe; Lelong, Olivia; Lenneis, Eva; Logvin, Andrey; Lüth, Friedrich; Marton, Tibor; Marley, Jane; Mortimer, Richard; Oosterbeek, Luiz; Oross, Krisztián; Pavúk, Juraj; Pechtl, Joachim; Pétrequin, Pierre; Pollard, Joshua; Pollard, Richard; Powlesland, Dominic; Pyzel, Joanna; Raczky, Pál; Richardson, Andrew; Rowe, Peter; Rowland, Stephen; Rowlandson, Ian; Saile, Thomas; Sebők, Katalin; Schier, Wolfram; Schmalfuß, Germo; Sharapova, Svetlana; Sharp, Helen; Sheridan, Alison; Shevnina, Irina; Sobkowiak-Tabaka, Iwona; Stadler, Peter; Stäuble, Harald; Stobbe, Astrid; Stojanovski, Darko; Tasić, Nenad; van Wijk, Ivo; Vostrovská, Ivana; Vuković, Jasna; Wolfram, Sabine; Zeeb-Lanz, Andrea; Thomas, Mark G.In European and many African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian populations, lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic trait to have evolved over the past 10,000 years(1). Although the selection of LP and the consumption of prehistoric milk must be linked, considerable uncertainty remains concerning their spatiotemporal configuration and specific interactions(2,3). Here we provide detailed distributions of milk exploitation across Europe over the past 9,000 years using around 7,000 pottery fat residues from more than 550 archaeological sites. European milk use was widespread from the Neolithic period onwards but varied spatially and temporally in intensity. Notably, LP selection varying with levels of prehistoric milk exploitation is no better at explaining LP allele frequency trajectoriesthan uniform selection since the Neolithic period. In the UK Biobank(4,5) cohort of 500,000 contemporary Europeans, LP genotype was only weakly associated with milk consumption and did not show consistent associations with improved fitness or health indicators. This suggests that other reasons for the beneficial effects of LP should be considered for its rapid frequency increase. We propose that lactase non-persistent individuals consumed milk when it became available but, under conditions of famine and/or increased pathogen exposure, this was disadvantageous, driving LP selection in prehistoric Europe. Comparison of model likelihoods indicates that population fluctuations, settlement density and wild animal exploitation-proxies for these drivers-provide better explanations of LP selection than the extent of milk exploitation. These findings offer new perspectives on prehistoric milk exploitation and LP evolution.