Climatic events and environmental adaptations relating to the Mesolithic hominids of the Gangetic Plain

This study discusses the anthropological thesis that human body builds are linear and gracile with extremities relatively long in relation to trunk height dimensions among ancient and modern Homo sapiens inhabiting tropical environments. Populations adapted to cold stress conditions, ancient and modern, possess more massive body forms with shorter extremities and relatively long trunks and are skeletally robust. Anthropometric measurements of the femora are the components of the Robusticity Index, a value that has been used to support the idea that geographical latitudes and climates affect these physical developments. This index is evaluated with respect to early Holocene skeletal series from north-central India at the burial sites of Sarai Nahar Rai, Mahadaha, and Damdaha that are situated on the Gangetic Plain and at Lekhahia in the adjacent Vindhya Hills. Laboratory analyses by four paleoanthropologists, Canadian and American, lead them to conclude that the Gangetic hominids reveal a pronounced degree of muscular-skeletal robusticity and relatively tall stature for adult males and females. As hunter-gatherers, these ancient populations led stressful lifeways demanding a robust muscular-skeletal system energized in ways distinct from that of their descendants whose socioeconomic strategies involved domestication of plants and animals, sedentary village life and seasonal pastoralism. This difference is demonstrated in studies of skeletal remains from food-producing and herding communities of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age of prehistoric South Asia. Robusticity of postcranial bones of the Gangetic Mesolithic populations is likely due to markers of occupational stress (MOS) rather than to variables of latitudes and climates, or to a single indicial category of anthropometric measurements-the Robusticity Index.