Darwin's island: the galapagos in the garden of england by Steve Jones

Author:Steve Jones [Steve Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sciences
ISBN: 9780349121413
Published: 2010-04-01T06:01:35+00:00

The first farmers modified their charges in both body and mind and their modern descendants do the same in a more rational fashion - but the new way of life altered the ancient farmers’ minds and bodies as well. The new domestics, both plant and animal, were agents of selection upon those who had tamed them. The past ten millennia have been an era of exceptional change for humankind, for Homo sapiens has evolved fast since agriculture began.

Our own genetic equivalent of the silver fox mutation, the blonde, is a creature of the fields. Just one person in fifty, worldwide, has fair hair. Before Columbus confused matters, almost all of them lived within two thousand kilometres of Copenhagen (and their close relatives the redheads abounded in Scotland, Wales and Ireland). The three or four genes responsible have become common in recent times. Farming is to blame.

North-west Europe is (or was, before the development of modern varieties) the only place on Earth where grain can be cultivated north of a line that passes, more or less, through Birmingham. Wheat, barley, rye and the rest need warmth to grow. In the Middle East, where those crops began, the sun shines upon both the fields and those who cultivate them. Our own landscape is dreary for many months of the year, and the peasants till their fields in gloom. Even so, the Gulf Stream imports energy from the tropics and heats up the ground at the end of winter, when Europe is short of sunbeams but seeds need warmth. As a result, the crops can flourish. For the five thousand years since they arrived in northern parts, a grain-based economy depended on Neptune’s help.

I once spent a decade in Edinburgh and saw the sun for a few days. My present home in London has, by comparison, the equivalent of an extra whole month of full sunshine each year. Scotland has the worst health in western Europe and Glasgow, its cloudiest city, has levels of chronic illness higher than any other British town. Perhaps its climate is as much to blame as its much-discussed fondness for alcohol, tobacco and deep-fried Mars Bars. Vitamin D deficiency is twice as frequent in Scotland as in England and any gene that reduces skin pigment, improves the ability to soak up sunshine and make the crucial substance would be favoured. The nation has, as a result, plenty of blondes, and the incidence of the gene for red hair, with the almost translucent skin that often goes with it, rises to nearly one in three.

A cereal diet (even when its ingredients are transformed into sticky sweets) is all well and good when supplemented by other foods, but is risky when life is just one grain after another, which for our peasant ancestors it often was. Cereals are low on vitamins, vitamin D, the anti-rickets substance, most of all. A move out of Africa had, many years earlier, led to the evolution of white skin to help the northern hunter-gatherers to make the vitamin in sunlight.

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