Study Links 10,000 Years of Food Inequality

Why this is here: The study found men were, on average, 2.16 times more likely than women to be in the top 10% with the greatest access to meat consumption across the entire dataset.

A Franco-Canadian team led by Rozenn Colleter of INRAP analyzed chemical data from 12,281 individuals across 673 European sites. The researchers examined bone chemistry to assess dietary inequalities from the start of agriculture to 1840. They focused on isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, which reveal plant and protein consumption over a person’s lifetime.

The team carefully selected sites with at least ten well-preserved skeletons, excluding children and prioritizing individuals with confidently determined sex. They noted a bias towards male remains in the data, potentially due to better preservation of male graves and skeletal health. To measure inequality, researchers used the interdecile range—the gap between the best and worst-fed 10% of each population—a tool borrowed from economics.

The study reveals that inequalities began increasing with the Bronze Age, peaking during the Iron Age, Antiquity, and late Middle Ages. It also provides large-scale quantitative evidence that women consistently had less access to nutritious food, particularly meat, than men. While societal factors clearly drive these differences, further research with more systematic collagen sampling is needed to refine these findings.