Group items tagged

some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history

nasty, brutish, and short

progressivist perspective

Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries.

How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?

indirect test:

these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors.

obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.

the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients.

Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.

the average height of hunger-gatherers

a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor.

Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.

many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

deep class divisions.

there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others.

since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth).

Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000,

fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.