WHEAT AND BARLEY

​​Celiac Disease and the alcohol buzz

The regular cooking of food, along with the formation of tribes and other modern behaviors, has enabled Homo sapiens to occupy almost every ecosystem on the face of the Earth, and when nothing else could be found to eat, it seemed that grass seeds could be cooked and eaten.  Unfortunately, many people, especially infants, were unable to fully digest the seeds of some of the grasses of the Middle East.  Infants, especially, sometimes became sickly, and sometimes even died, from eating cooked grass seeds.  This led to the gradual elimination of such people from the gene pool; but many people even today are not able to fully digest the cooked seeds of wheat, barley and rye, and become sick if they try to eat those cereals.

In spite of this many people started the practice gathering mature grass seeds during the dry season and saving them as emergency food.  This had the unintended side effect of beginning a gradual domestication of some of the Middle Eastern grasses, and also gave humans a new way to make alcohol.

Members of the genus Homo did not like to climb trees, and they weren't very good at it, but they sometimes picked rotting fruit off the the ground and ate it, and they evolved an ability to metabolize the alcohol in rotten fruit to get an extra energy boost.  This had the side effect of giving members of the Homo clade a buzz from alcohol that apes did not get

The Younger Dryas, the comet and the aftermath

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The Younger Dryas was the most recent (the youngest, in a geological sense) of three episodes of cooling that interrupted the warming trend that followed the Last Glacial Maximum.  (The Last Glacial Maximum occurred about 20,000 years ago.)  Volcanism might have played a major part in causing the Younger Dryas, but this episode had a dramatic start, about 12,975 years ago, when a comet shredded into tiny fragments in the Earth's atmosphere and pieces of it smashed into the Earth.

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The dense cloud of tiny fragments from the comet hung in the atmosphere and the stratosphere for many years, and at first virtually none of the sun's light reached ground level.  Gradually, some of the larger particles fell out, leaving a thick haze, but by that time most of the smaller plant life like grasses were dead.  Even the leaves of trees were turning yellow and falling to the ground, and many herbivores were starving to death.

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People who had lived in that region when the comet had struck had been hunters and gatherers, but after the comet had struck and the sky had turned dark there had suddenly been few animals to hunt and less food to gather, and consequently people had begun to starve.

Those people had seen the fireworks in the sky and witnessed the darkening of the sky, and so they knew that the cataclysm had hit them from the sky.  When the air had cleared to the point where they could make out the stars at night they took careful note of the positions of the galaxies.  Two thousand years later their descendants built a series of underground temples that were covered over by timbers to make them resemble caves.  The temples were built at the top of a hill or small mountain and nobody lived near there because water quickly ran off the mountain when it rained, and there was no water available near there.  The isolation of the place contributed to its exoticism and mystique.  Moreover its position at the top of a hill brought it closer to the heavens, which apparently ruled events on Earth.

The purpose of these cave-like constructions was to simulate the underground homes of their ancestors and serve as the home of the priests who lived there and represented those ancestors.  Those ancestors had lived underground because caves were dry and relatively warm, and after the climate had warmed, following the last glacial maximum, changes in climate had sent people back underground again and again, particularly after the fireworks had been observed in the sky.

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The ring of monumental constructions were clustered near the highest point on a hill or small mountain that is known to the Turks as Gobekli Tepe, or "Potbellied Hill".  As each temple was built, the previous one was filled in, possibly because the old temple was considered outdated or obsolete in some way.  The only way to completely get rid of old ideas (and old views of the sky) as embodied in the temple's construction and carvings was to get a fresh start.

Filling in and covering over the monuments created a mound where the old monument had been.  The total of the filled-in constructions formed a circular mound with a depression in its center which looked like a navel on top of the mountain, and that was the origin of the name, "Gobekli Tepe".

Near this circular mound, archaeologists found the remains of a large cistern and a water collection system for channeling rainwater into it.  This allowed priestly astronomers to cook meals of processed grass seeds and the sacrificial offerings of pilgrims who visited the temple that was currently in operation.     to permanently reside at the site, most likely in underground chambers would improve the ability of the priests to observe the stars at night.

Other customs of cave-dwelling ancestors were also observed, such as ritual cannibalism and drinking liquids out of the skulls of priests who had died.  With the coming of the comet, study of the nighttime sky had become quite serious, so the priests were all male, while gatherers of seeds were probably females and children.  The workers who gathered seeds or did other chores may have resided in rectangular structurers that were external to the underground temple.

All of these workers, including the astronomer/priests had to be paid in some way, so visitors to the temple most likely brought gifts of food and expected to receive in return some favor from the gods who resided in the sky -- or perhaps within the earth.

By the time the last temple observatory was built it was well realized that large-scale movements of the stars had inevitably caused the successive temples to become obsolete, and astronomers had worked their way backward in time to when the comet had struck.  Possibly in commemoration of this achievement a statue was erected to represent the astronomer or astronomers who had made this discovery.  This statue was hidden in a wall cavity and in a reclining position as if observing the heavens through the overhead roof.  Or perhaps he was simply contemplating movements of the stars.  He had an enormous head, to emphasize his immense intellect, and was shown scratching his scrotum or pulling his scrotum out from between his legs, which emphasizes that he was a living individual, resting, contemplating and perhaps observing the heavens.  Otherwise, there would be no point in his residing within a wall, where he wasn't visible to any human observer.

Hiding him inside a wall perhaps reflected an ancient belief that spirits reside within the earth that are brought to the surface by drawings on cave walls.  The ancestors of the people who lived in the region or made pilgrimages to visit the temple had, during the Younger Dryas and during the earlier ice age resided in caves and perhaps drawn pictures on the cave walls.  Now, their visits to the temple were reminders of this lifestyle of their ancestors.

The "Vulture Stone" was also found in this last temple to be built.  It displayed the zodiac as it had appeared when the comet had struck the Earth.

At some distance from Gobekli Tepe archaeologists have found another temple, contemporary with Gobekli Tepe, that contained a statue of a charging boar.  Perhaps this represented the fireball that had struck from the sky.

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Grass-seed consumption

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Climate change also played a part in both the scarcity of grass-eating herbivores and a switch to a sedentary, seed-gathering lifestyle in which people started to domesticate grazing animals and gather grass seeds that were processed and then cooked into mush.  The climate changes included extreme seasonality in which extremely dry seasons alternated with wet seasons, lightning strikes during dry seasons that started massive wildfires that swept through dry grass.  Heavy rains that followed in the wake of these wildfires then eroded the topsoil on hills and slopes, sweeping it into valleys where it was deposited in deep layers of topsoil.

All of this resulted in eroded hills where grasses barely grew and moist valley where grasses grew abundantly.  Human populations that crowded into these valleys, and so did grass-eating herbivores, and the juxtaposition encouraged people to round up the animals instead of killing them.  Grasses grew abundantly in these river valleys, and crowded out other plants; so order to conserve the precious herbivores, people began to supplement their diets with processed and cooked grass seeds.  Gathering of the best seeds and seasonal spillage of seeds on the ground subsequently led to the evolution of domesticated grasses, so this was the genesis of farming.

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Since the gathering of plant foods was women's work, men spent their time chipping stone vessels out of solid stone for storing, cooking and serving grass seeds.  We tend to think that the Neolithic, or "New Stone Age", was a time when people made new kinds of tools (such as composite tools) in order to make or construct new kinds of things (such as structures), but  I think the period is better characterized as one in which time hung heavy on men's hands; their primary function had been taken away from them, first by a massive die-off of the animals that they hunted and then by the domestication of animals.  Even after wild animal populations recovered, men were often more useful for guarding domesticated animals and stores of grass seeds than for hunting wild animals and bringing back the carcasses.  Moreover women, rather than men, often cared for the domesticated animals.

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Even as the Younger Dryas waned, human populations burgeoned because grass seeds were so rich in energy; shortage of energy foods had always been the limiting factor in the growth of human populations

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The chipping of storage and cooking vessels out of stone was not enough to keep men busy, nor did they like to do it, so they often spent their time trying to solve the riddle of what had befallen them.  Men with time on their hands sat in groups at night to watch the sky and report what they saw; those who were very good at this then became professional astronomers, and were paid to watch the sky every night and analyze what they saw; other men were paid by the community to build observatories, based on various designs, to help the astronomers do their work.  Their work was to discover the cause of what had happened.

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Women were no longer dependent on men.  Indeed, men were dependent on women, because men refused to do the women's work of gathering, processing and cooking grass seeds.  Moreover, men lost their main remaining usefulness when women started to make pottery.  Women ruled their households, and women in the village communities often ruled the men, rather than the reverse.  This role reversal, as compared with most modern societies, is reflected in the idealized art of the earliest farming communities which often featured women with one arm draped across the back of a man, as if she owned him.  The men simply folded his hands, as if he had nothing to do, aside from looking after his wife's wealth.

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A ziggurat on Sardinia

As populations increased in Anatolia because people were generally well fed, elites increased taxes and rents to pay for their own lavish lifestyles and building programs, and this led many farmers to abandon Anatolia and spread through southern Europe and northern Africa, and they were known by many names:  The Greeks called those who clung to an area at the northern end of the Balkan Peninsula "Pelasgians", the Romans referred to those who clung to an area near the northern end of the Italian Peninsula "Etruscans", and we ourselves call those who still cling to a mountainous area in the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula "Basques", but those who inhabited Sardinia in prehistoric and historic times will have to remain nameless.

Their latest culture, before they were absorbed by Rome and consequently becoming Romans themselves -- and nonexistent as a people -- is known as the Nuragic culture, but this name refers to the multitude of Nuraghe -- stone towers -- that they built on the island, and can hardly be applied to a people -- people are not stone towers.  The early Sardinian farmers built a ziggurat-like platform on Sardinia, but "ziggurat-like" also does not accurately describe people.  Nor can these people be identified simply as "Sardinians", because Sardinians existed both before these people came to Sardinia and after they were absorbed by a Roman population of Sardinians.

However we decide to refer to these people, there may not have been any connection between the ziggurats of the Middle East and the ziggurat-like platform that was constructed on Sardinia shortly after the colonists established themselves there, aside from a belief that powerful gods ruled from the sky.

The platform was constructed near the northern end of the island, and it served as a site for sacrifices -- sheep, pigs and cattle were sacrificed at an altar in the center of the platform, and the priests who cooked and ate the sacrificed animals most likely served as intermediaries between those who sacrificed and the gods that looked down from above and symbolically consumed the sacrificial offerings.  Those animals that were not consumed by the priests would most likely be sold to pilgrims who came from all over Sardinia to watch the ceremonies.

The earliest pottery of the Sardinians indicates that the colonists who established themselves there might have been transported to Sardinia from northeastern Africa or alternatively from colonies that had previously been established along the coast to the east -- on the Italian Peninsula or the Balkan Peninsula.

Genocide

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The alluvial plain of Mesopotamia is much too big and deep to excavate the whole thing, so there is no practical way to determine archaeologically just how ancient Sumer really was; but grasses most likely were domesticated as early on the alluvial plain as anywhere; conditions were often perfect on this alluvial plain, near some of the earliest Sumerian sites and ideal for the growth of gasses and other crops.  Wherever there was enough rainfall, and along riverbanks, agriculturalists could have easily grown crops there without creating an irrigation system.

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The sowing, reaping, processing and cooking of grass seeds was women' work -- the work of men was hunting.  Moreover, as well-fed human populations increased, and it became necessary to travel long distances to find animals to hunt, domesticated sheep and goats (mostly cared for by women) made it unnecessary for men to do anything at all besides the tedious chore of chipping cooking and serving vessels out of stone.

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Consequently, men began to look for other things to do, such as hunting down and slaughtering the archaic Homo sapiens from the southern swamplands who had formed a habit of stealing crops and domesticated animals from the farming communities.

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The hunters, who used bow-and-arrow killing systems, far outnumbered the women and children who had been stealing the crops and animals.  After the thieves had been wiped out the hunters went after those who tried to hide in the swampland.

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Incidentally, a man living in the United States has been found to be a direct descendant, in the male line of descent, of the archaic Homo sapiens who continued to live in or near the swamplands of southern Mesopotamia after others had populated Africa.  His ancestors may have been among those who survived ​by abandoning the swampland altogether and subsequently avoided all contact with modern humans.  (They may have escaped along the shoreline.)

​Power struggle in Spain

The first farmers to come to the Iberian peninsula, where Spain is now located, came by crossing the sea from the Italian Peninsula or from Sardinia after founding colonies in western North Africa, on the Balkan Peninsula (Greece), on the Italian Peninsula and on Sardinia.  These migrating farmers brought domesticated animals with them everywhere they went -- sheep, goats, cattle and pigs.  Meanwhile hunter gatherers retreated to mountainous areas and looked on in dismay.

As domesticated animals had come into the Iberian Peninsula the hunter gatherers must have learned early on that the rules had changed, and that any attempt to hunt the animals would trigger a deadly war with the new masters of the plains.  That was probably when the hunter gatherers had begun to retreat to mountainous areas.  But then the farmers began to bring their animals into the mountains, and the hunter gatherers had no choice but to engage the encroachers in a deadly war.

When an extended family of Neolithic farmers cum shepherds settled into a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains (in the north of what is now Spain) hunter gatherers ambushed them and killed every man, woman and child.  For good measure they also cooked and ate the unlucky farmers, perhaps in order to demonstrate their own power and also to acquire new power -- just as they would occasionally kill and eat such animals as wild cats, badgers and foxes in order to to acquire their qualities.

The farmers who had been killed had not gone into the mountains simply to grow crops; they had brought domesticated animals with them.  So, why did the hunter gatherers not just steal the animals, rather than engaging the farmers in direct combat?  They did so because the settlers who came into the mountains had demonstrated their prowess by using deadly force, primarily bow-and-arrow technology, to prevent theft of their animals, and thus demonstrated their own prowess.  That was why the farmers and their families were slaughtered and eaten.

Otzi the Ice Man

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The Italian Tyrol, where Otzi died. is unique in Europe.  It is a time capsule where little has changed since farmers from Anatolia first arrived there about 7,000 years ago.

Since the farmers first arrived in the Tyrol, which is rugged country just east of Switzerland, farmers have continued to farm in the bottomland while herding their cattle to higher elevations for the summer months.  And few strangers have passed through the region, perhaps because they were not welcome there, and the locals quite effectively kept them out.

Otzi was obviously a hunter.  But what was a hunter doing in a region that was patrolled by cattle herders on the lookout for poachers?  The answer is that he himself had been poaching.

Copper was rare in the Tyrol when Otzi lived, and cowbells, which are made of copper alloys, had not yet been invented.  So, how did farmers who owned the animals that Otzi was poaching find their animals in the fall when it was time for them to be returned to the valley?  The answer is that some of the animals, which were allowed to roam freely through the valleys and hillsides during the summer months, were not found and returned in the fall.

Otzi's community lived on the fringe of this system, poaching during the summer months and finding frozen carcasses during the winter and thawing them out.

Otzi died a hero.  He had led a posse away from where his community was hiding, and he was carefully buried at the bottom of a hole six feet deep that they had chipped out of solid ice.  There he was able to rest in peace for millennia, undisturbed by animals or by people.

MILLET AND RICE

Farming in the Far East

Twenty-three thousand years ago farmers in the valley of the Yellow River in China were using stones to grind foods that they gathered, including grasses, beans, wild millet seeds, wild yams and snakegourd root.  As they gathered, processed and cooked these foods from wild plants they discovered that the plants could be encouraged to grow again by dropping seeds on the ground.  Moreover, plants that produced edible seeds often grew better seeds if only the best seeds were replanted.  This was particularly true of millet.  As these onetime hunter gatherers improved their crops they became farmers.

Consistent access to energy-rich foods caused human populations to expand rapidly, until human populations became so large that animals were overhunted, so the farmers began to trap pigs and keep them captive, so as to ensure access to meat throughout the year.  These 

processes were similar to the ones that led to farming in the Middle East, and farming started about the same time in the Far East as it did in the Middle East.

Anatolian roots of Chinese culture

Ironically the most brilliant stage of this early development of Chinese culture was reached by the Hongshan, who farmed in the West Liao Basin of what is now Inner Mongolia.  It is ironic because it was founded by farmers from Anatolia.  We know that Anatolian farmers formed the nucleus of this brilliant early Chinese culture because simple words in the Korean language, which descended from that of the Hongshan, have Indo European roots.  These include the numbers "one", "two" and "three" and words that identify close family relations.

In spite of its brilliance the Hongshan culture seems to have given rise to no kingship.  This is not surprising, because all of the early agricultural societies were governed by matriarchal elites.  (This includes the early Sumerians, the early Minoans and the early Egyptians.)  However, the Hongshan did seem to give rise to other features of early Chinese society, including burial practices that were intended to ensure a continuing relationship between the living and the dead.  The concept of the Lucky Dragon also had its origin in the Hongshan culture.

The concept of the Lucky Dragon is unlikely to have sprung from a purely fictional creature.  Hongshan models of this creature, sculpted in jade, show a snakelike creature with a head and snout like that of a pig, and this might just be a fairly accurate renditions by craftsmen who haven't actually seen the creature.  Capture of such a creature would be a lucky event if the creature were large enough to feed an entire village.  Capture of a Lucky Dragon could be the occasion for a great feast.

The Hongshan culture ended very unluckily when the monsoon changed its yearly course and their homeland turned into a desert, and this prompted many of them to move far to the east, to the region that is north of the Korean Peninsula.  As their population expanded in that region they pushed into the Korean Peninsula itself.

Those who pushed on still further, across a land bridge to the Japanese Archipelago, combined forces with fishermen (from the Ryukyu Islands to the south) to push the indigenous hunter gatherers north, into Hokkaido.  At the same time the new immigrants discarded their Koreanic language for that of the fishermen.

The language spoken by the fishermen who had joined with those who had crossed the land bridge was a Ryukyuan language that the fishermen had brought from the Ryukyu Islands to the south of the Japanese Archipelago, and this was the seed from which the Japanese language grew.

A surviving Anatolian population in Central China

While the Korean and Japanese people had deep racial ties with many people who had moved from elsewhere in Eastern Asia and from Island Southeasr Asia, the original Hongshan population had been relatively isolated, and had largely retained the racial characteristics of the original population influx from Anatolia.  While very few of these Anatolian farmers remained in Inner Mongolia while that region turned to desert, some of them simply moved a little bit south, to the edge of the Gobi Desert and established themselves there, again in an isolated place, and they remained there until an American sinologist by the name of Homer Dubs noticed European traits such as blue eyes and fair hair of people in the village.  (I might interject that these were prominent features of the animal herders that moved into Anatolia through the Caucasus region.)

Mr. Dubs also noticed that the architecture of many buildings in the village was distinctly different from anything that he had seen elsewhere in China so he wrote a paper in which he proposed that people in the village were descended from Roman soldiers who had been defeated in battle and had fled to this remote place -- but this theory has been disproven by DNA tests.

The scientists should take another look.

Merging of peoples and technologies

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Millet-growing technology was developed along the Yellow River where the climate was cool and dry, while rice-growing technology was developed along the Yangtze River where the climate was warmer and wetter.  Combined with other crops, these grains fed all of China.  Similarly, sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated in the Middle East while while pigs were domesticated in both Europe and Asia.  Chickens were first domesticated from the beautiful red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, which were at first treasured for their exotic beauty.  Chickens are now valued mostly for their meat and eggs, and the beauty of their ancestors, the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, is seldom seen in domesticated chickens today.  Meanwhile, fishing technology which had been developed in Island Southeast Asia was brought to the Japanese Archipelago where it was combined with rice cultivation to feed the people of Japan.

People from the fishing cultures of Island Southeast Asia had been cruising along the eastern coast of Asia for fifty thousand years, fishing in the rich coastal waters there, but they didn't know how to deal with the bitterly cold and wet winter storms that they encoun north of the main Japanese islands -- until they met up with people from Siberia, most likely on Sakhalin Island or the Kamchatka.  From the Siberians they learned how to make all-weather garments and how to survive in the region.  After that they conquered the New World by sailing along the glaciated coasts of Beringia and along the coasts of North and South America.  They left their footprints near the tip of South America.

Self domestication and modernity

Tribal societies, besides helping our ancestors to take over Africa, affected them more directly:  institutions of government such as councils of elders sometimes imposed penalties on their members, such as ostracism.  Imposing such penalties, which could affect an individual's ability to procreate, tended to weed out individuals who tended to react violently, and this amounts to selection for tameness, the precondition for domestication syndrome to appear in a population, because the least reactive individuals in a population tend to be those in which precursors to fetal neural cells and certain other kinds of cells (such as pigment-producing cells and bone-producing cells) are delayed in their development during the embryonic stage of development.  The delayed development of the neural cells then results in immature behaviors, like a less reactive personality, to persist even into adulthood, and the delayed development of other kinds of precursor cells can result in anatomic and other consequences.

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For example, if precursor cells to pigment-producing cells do not fully mature, the pigments produced by the pigment-producing cells may be altered, and likewise if precursors to bone-producing cells are delayed in their development bones might not fully develop at later stages of life.  As a result, the skeleton may not be fully developed even in adulthood.  If no outside agent is responsible for selection for tameness this suite of characteristics is called self-domestication.

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Domestication syndrome is also observable in domesticated animals, which tend to be tamer than their wild counterparts but also tend to have altered coat colors and rounder heads.  These characteristics can show up in he course of only a few generations, but many of them interfere with the viability of the domesticated or self-domesticated animal, and subsequent evolution eliminates many of these in the course of time.

For instance, slow maturation of pigment-producing cells can alter or reduce the number of pigment-producing cells in the skin, hair or eyes.  But the eyes of newborn human infants are particularly vulnerable to damage by ultraviolet light from the noonday sun, especially in the tropics, and reduced or altered pigmentation can make their eyes even more vulnerable to damage.  Such damage to the eyes can reduce the ability of individuals to pass on their genes, and this can lead to positive selection for those whose eyes are better protected by pigmentation.

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We might note in this connection that many modern people whose ancestors lived along the northern coast of western Europe have retained the varied eye colors of their self-domesticated ancestors. This is because oceanic and atmospheric conditions melted the glaciers along the Atlantic coast, and this enabled large numbers of people to live far to the north, where sun does not rise so high in the sky, and where ultra-violet light is filtered out as it passes through the atmosphere at shallow angles.  Moreover, infants lying on their backs are less prone to being blinded from staring up at the noonday sun, if the sun does not rise so high in the sky.  Thus far-northern people with blue eyes were less vulnerable to eye damage and blue eyes were retained in far-north people.

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Incidentally, reduced skin pigmentation was favored in the far north for another reason altogether:  heavy pigmentation of the skin reduced exposure to the sun’s rays of deeper layers of the skin, where Vitamin D is produced.  Slowed maturation of these cells caused altered skin pigmentation, and this altered pigmentation was retained among far-north people, who benefitted from it.  In the last few thousand years lack of sufficient dietary sources of Vitamin D  have become a problem further south, as wild animals such as aurochs and antelope became scarce.  As a result, people throughout the rest of Europe have also lost much of their skin pigmentation.

Other accidental consequences of slowed maturation at the embryonic stage of development were also retained in the far north, as well:  lightened hair pigmentation tended to be retained and baldness at birth tended to be retained in the far north.  (Freckles and red-colored hair, on the other hand, were consequences of interbreeding with Homo neanderthalensis.)

Some of the symptoms of self-domestication faded rapidly, especially in the tropics.

Self domestication and farming

Humans were already super-competitive among the medium-sized species of the Earth when increased consumption of grass seeds and other farm products led to even higher population densities among them.  This, in turn, led to further intensification of self-domestication.

High population density and stable societies had prompted modern qualities of mind to emerge, especially along the southern coast of Africa and in other refugia, and the same high population densities had caused these same populations to be strongly affected by self-domestication.

One result of self-domestication was that juvenile characteristics such as playfulness tended to be retained into adulthood, and this playfulness is an aspect of the modern mind.  Another result of self-domestication was a longer period of immaturity early in life, which prompted more extensive brain remodeling during that period.  This also helped to drive the emergence of the modern mind.  Thus, we can see that self domestication and the modern mind were (and are) deeply entangled with each other.

Whiter skin in Europe and the far north

Millet was later imported into Europe, and this was probably one reason for dramatic changes there, because millet grew faster and had a higher energy content than wheat and barley.  As a result of This resulted in a dramatic increase in in population in some parts of Europe, and fields were subdivided into smaller plots.  The farmers moved closer to their small plots of ground and defended them fiercely, so that the elites lost the ability to tax the small farmers, who would harvest their crops quickly and hide the grain in small bundles.  Consequently, the elites lost their ability to tax the farmers, and were often unable to maintain themselves in power.

Some rootless people who had been squeezed out by rising populations began to not only steal crops from the larger fields, but to squat on land owned by the elites and dispossess tenant farmers.      that was being farmed by tenant farmers.  This made it impossible for many elites to maintain themselves except by joining the lower classes and farming their own land.

Men were often afraid to leave their land even for short periods in order to go hunting, nor did they have extra land on which to raise domesticated animals, and this often resulted in a shortage of Vitamin D in their diet.  Many of the farmers had weak bones, and their children had weak bones and often were unable to acquire and defend even small plots of land.  The survivors often had whiter skin, with less pigment, that could absorb more sunlight to manufacture Vitamin D.  The European population gradually became whiter, and they became better able to endure poor diets.