Sara L. Juengst

High altitude agriculture in the Titicaca basin (800 BCE-200 CE): Impacts on nutrition and disease load.

This study investigates the biological impacts of sedentism and agriculture on humans living in the high altitude landscape of the Titicaca Basin between 800 BCE and CE 200. The transition to agriculture in other global areas resulted in increases in disease and malnutrition; the high altitude of the Titicaca Basin could have exacerbated this. Our objective is to test whether the high altitude of the Titicaca Basin created a marginal environment for early agriculturalists living there, reflected through elevated rates of malnutrition and/or disease.

Introduction: Humans in marginal environments: Adaptation among living and ancient peoples

As a species with unparalleled behavioral plasticity, humans have occupied a majority of possible habitats on the planet. Many of these are what ecologists or development experts would characterize as “marginal,” meaning that they contain only limited resources for human subsistence. It is often assumed that to sustain human habitation, these environments require higher than desirable labor input or competition. However, precise definitions of marginal environments are rarely provided. The term usually refers to arid regions with limited or unpredictable water sources (e.g., Campbell, 2012; Clarke et al., 2015; Harrod and Martin, 2014; Klaus, 2014; Robinson, 1985), but could also be used to describe high-altitude, tropical, or arctic zones. It may also refer to a human population’s marginal status in terms of access to nutrition or other resources (McDade and Nyberg, 2010)—in other words, a politically or socially marginal status. In much of the literature on Eurasian prehistory, “marginal environment” is shorthand for land that is not suitable for intensive agriculture, even if it is suitable for other forms of subsistence activities (Wilkinson, 2012). Being “marginal,” though, does not mean an area is uninhabitable or uninhabited. Many areas that are described as “marginal” show evidence for dense and prolonged human settlement in the past (Genz, 2012; Harrod and Martin, 2014). In some cases, this disconnect is due to a mischaracterization of past environmental conditions (Caramanica and Koons, 2016). In others, it is due to a lack of context or clear definition of what makes the environment “marginal.” The unifying feature of marginal environments is not their lack of suitability for a specific way of life, such as sedentary agricultural, but how difficult it is to make a living of any kind in them. They share the characteristics of requiring high labor input, technological innovation, or competition, and of unpredictable ecological conditions and frequent resource shortages. Marginality begins where human culture and technology can no longer buffer against environmental or sociopolitical stressors (Harrod and Martin, 2014). The definition of marginality, therefore, should rely more on an understanding of human biocultural systems, and the stress under which those systems operate in a given environmental and cultural context. This can be accomplished by undermining the central position that agriculture and sedentism occupy in the scholarly imagination, and bringing pastoralism, gathering, transhumance, and other adaptive behaviors into the center of the analysis on their own terms— not as inferior alternatives to agriculture, but as successful strategies for living in the margins. With these lifeways, some marginal environments become not so marginal after all. It is also necessary to consider the costs of social marginalization, not only on the ability of the people we study to survive and thrive, but also in our own scholarship. Resource shortages and uncertainty, commonly assumed to be consequences of ecological marginality, can arise from socially imposed limits on access to resources and power, most visibly from practices such as enslavement, and in a less visible way from diffuse processes such as globalization. To be complete, a consideration of marginality must include social, economic, and political factors. Similarly, research such as that represented in this special issue has the power to center non-European, non-agricultural practices, such as entomophagy and dryland animal husbandry, that have enormous implications for the ability of our species to survive in an ecologically challenged future. The articles in this issue represent recent work on these questions from a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives, using both skeletal and living populations. The first two papers deal with adaptations to high altitude, and the consequences for human health of these adaptations. Jacqueline Eng and Mark Aldenderfer’s article explores ancient high-altitude settlement in Nepal from 400–50 BCE and 400–825 CE. The authors found significant variation in oral health between sites and between the sexes, but no significant variation between sites in adult stature, and low overall levels of general stress markers. They conclude that these ancient populations were able to adapt successfully to the high-altitude environment, while local differences in food resources or preparation could account for variations in oral health. In the next paper, Sara Juengst, Dale Hutchinson, and Sergio Ch avez used skeletal remains from early farming communities in highland Bolivia to investigate whether the

A call for action: Why anthropologists can (and should) join the discussion on climate change through education

Anthropologists, human biologists, and researchers in related fields have been investigating the human‐environment interaction and its effects on health for decades. While there have been numerous studies from the medical‐ and health‐sectors pointing to the connection between climate change and health needs, as well as studies advocating for the incorporation of appropriate curricula addressing these needs in medical schools and health‐professional programs, this connection is not being systematically taught to our future healthcare professionals. Here, we first briefly summarize research highlighting the interaction between environment and health; we follow this with discussion about why this interaction is important for current and future medical professionals to understand, particularly in light of the current issues of climate change. We specifically address how anthropologists and human biologists have contributed to the literature on marginal environments and climate change, and how anthropological research may be incorporated in health‐oriented and medical classrooms to aid in this discussion. Through interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropologists, human biologists, medical‐health professionals, and researchers in other fields, we can learn from our past and play a part in piecing together our future health care issues and needs.