Among the fears critics most often cite is that genetic modified food will change human DNA and life as we know it. In fairness this is probably true, after all farming has quite literally changed mankind’s DNA before and disrupted more than a few traditional societies. However, the changes that have developed in humans over time due to farmers’ genetically controlling the food supply tends to be forgotten in the shadows of new and sometimes mystifying technologies built to do the same thing – feed more people.
According to new research recently published in the journal Nature and summarized neatly in Science magazine, farming, which began about 10,000 years ago, “was one of the most dramatic events in human history.” For one thing, it led to a reshaping of our genomes so that we could digest starch and milk, something the hunter-gatherers could not do. The new research also suggests that the change in diet led to light skinned humans, a contradiction to previous research findings.
“Lalueza-Fox [geneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona in Spain] suggests that prehistoric hunter-gatherers got most of their vitamin D from eating lots of meat and that natural selection did not lead to the evolution of light skin until the advent of farming and diets based more on carbohydrates. Thus meat, fish, and eggs, which make up a much higher proportion of diets today than they did for early farmers, are a major source of vitamin D in modern populations, but early farmers would have been much more reliant on sunlight to help produce vitamin D in their skin. ‘It seems possible that latitude is not the key factor in skin depigmentation, but diet,’" he says in the Science magazine article.
But that was not the end of changes in humans brought about by the advent of farming and the farmers subsequent genetic manipulations.
“’It is quite clear that we are looking at a big genetic watershed’ during the transition from hunting and gathering to farming in which both genes and biology changed markedly,’” Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden, said in the Science magazine article. “’The farmers from across Europe ‘look the same’ and the hunter-gatherers also ‘look the same, the opposite of what we would expect from geography alone.’”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve not heard any criticism of genetically modified foods in the past changing the skin color of some people to white or making it possible for us all to enjoy a warm slice of newly baked bread. Although to be fair, this is the first research to show a correlation between diet and the evolution of skin color. There also doesn't appear to be any widespread grieving over the loss of a near-global nomadic lifestyle as homesteads permanently took root.
But wait, some might say, early farmers did not genetically modify food. Yes, they did. Check out the video below to understand more about how they did that and the effect on all of us from that day forward. But for now, suffice it to say that we called early genetic modification by a different overall catch word: domestication. Farmers took wildlife, be it mammal, fish, bird, or plant, and bred them carefully to increase food production. Controlled breeding is genetic manipulation.