Subsistence strategy changes: The evidence of entheseal changes

What is it about?

This paper uses previously published data from around the world to study the effect of subsistence strategy (agriculture, industrial societies etc.) on muscle attachments using the hypothesis that hunter-gatherer-type lifestyles should be the least “stressful” due to the longer period of evolutionary adaptation. The results show that this is not the case and reasons for this result, including inter-observer error and different age profiles are discussed.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This research is important because, for the first time, wider effects of subsistence strategy were studied in the context of entheseal changes (previously called musculoskeletal stress markers). The results show the broader trends of entheseal change scores by enthesis: this is particularly useful as it is known that some entheses exhibit more entheseal changes than others, thus new data can be compared to the overall scores allowing researchers to compare and contrast their results with a larger population.