| ▲ | asdff 3 hours ago | |
There would still be a ton of goiters if not for iodized salt, basically an obligatory vitamin intake. People had no good iodine source living inland where most anything they catch or grow is not going to have sufficient iodine no matter what it is they were eating. I'm not sure what the ancestral iodine source might have been. Fishing villages perhaps along the coast? Hard to say how much coast was relatively populated given challenges of shifting shorelines and archaeological efforts. You can still reproduce laden with a goiter however, and that is enough to keep chucking malnourished humans somewhere on earth. | ||
| ▲ | OkayPhysicist 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |
It takes a pretty extreme iodine deficiency to end up with goiters. In most environments, there's enough in the soil that eating local plants / animals that eat those plants supplies enough. The iodine deficiency issues that haunted the Swiss (and Appalachia) arose from people settling down from nomadic lifestyles, in mountainous regions that easily were leeched of iodine by rainfall, and then farming that already leeched soil until there wasn't any iodine left at all. | ||