The emergence of agriculture may have prompted many of the changes in human physiology seen in the fossil record. But in the absence of a baseline - a record of physiology before the advent of farming - it is hard to say which changes. We may now have that in the form of a genome of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer from Spain. The genes of this male, who lived around 7,000 years ago, had more in common with ancient genomes from Siberia than with other Europeans, suggesting a wide (if thinly spread) genetic continuity across Eurasia. He would have been lactose-intolerant and less able to digest starchy foods than Neolithic farming people, suggesting that these changes came in with agriculture.
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