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Teenage builders
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CianMcLiam
CianMcLiam
1067 posts

Edited Feb 28, 2017, 13:21
Re: Teenage builders
Feb 28, 2017, 13:18
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
CianMcLiam wrote:
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
nigelswift wrote:
Not to get too political but ....

1899 upper class Liverpool = 136 newborns out of 1000 would die before the age of 1

Working class = 274 infant deaths per 1000 births

Impoverished slums = 509 infant deaths per 1000 births

Alexander Finlaison reported = 1/2 of all children of farmers, laborers, artisans, & servants died before 5th birthday compared to 1 in 11 children of the land owning gentry

So I personally would take some convincing things in the Neolithic were better than that.



Not much to do with the Neolithic but keeping with the political(ish) :
UN data for contemporary infant mortality per 1000 .UK= 4.19 ,
US =5.97 . Africa has the bottom ten countries at 70 - 90 .
60 years ago only six countries in Africa were in the bottom ten , but the rates were 250 per 1,000 .


Yes, but as you've hinted at, my question would be why assume a high infant mortality in the Neolithic? (I am assuming that is the case in any published figures.)


As Tiompan says infants are likely to be under-represented in the archaeological record but they are still quite common. A more specific reason is the swift and pretty much complete replacement of lactose intolerance in adults with lactose tolerance during the Neolithic in Western Europe. This would have required a very strong selection pressure at the earliest stages in life where being able to tolerate milk longer than other infants was a very big life or death advantage.


I'm interested and ask for sources, but they do not appear to be forthcoming.

Are you suggesting lactose tolerance came with a Neolithic migration from the near east into europe? And you attribute a high mortality rate amongst infants to the success of migrants with lactose tolerance?
Am I understanding you correctly?
I really do need a source for this one, i've never heard anything like it.
BA perhaps, but not Neolithic.


I'm travelling for work so apologies if I can't list some references for you, but a quick search on Google will provide some good reading on the spread of lactose tolerance. In Britain and Ireland it is near 96% while in Central Europe it varies down to 60-70% dwindling to approx. 15-20% in Eastern and Southern Europe.

So it seems unlikely to have arrived along with the influx of farmers from the Middle East, 96% of whom had to have a gene for lactose tolerance. There seems to have been intense selection pressures in Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia that is associated with the spread of agriculture, during which lactose intolerance practically died out in North Western Europe. That implies that people who were born lactose intolerant seem not to have survived. This in turn implies heavy selection pressure during childhood, natural selection weeded out lactose intolerant individuals before they were old enough to reproduce.
There's some discussion on it here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048992/
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