Sott.net
Sun, 29 May 2011 00:00 CDT
While examining the available literature on health and nutrition from an evolutionary standpoint, one comes to the inevitable conclusion that, as far as diet is concerned, human beings entered a blind alley thousands of years ago. Even if by some miracle humanity as whole was to completely reorganize its diet overnight, an important question remains - have we engineered our environment beyond the point of no return?
Contrary to the popular belief held by many anthropologists that agriculture is one of man's greatest achievements, there is an increasing body of evidence which suggests that the human race actually set out on the path of self-destruction when it embraced agrarian societies.
The picture now emerging is that the switch from hunting and gathering occurred suddenly and was followed by a sharp drop in life expectancy. Ancient human bones found in archaeological layers dated since the adoption of agriculture reveal increased prevalence of disease and lesser numbers of aged people. For centuries after the adoption of agriculture, these bones also tell the stories of greater numbers of violent deaths when compared with bone remains from pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies. There is an undeniable echo of the Garden of Eden story here. This is, in fact, one of the greatest puzzles of prehistory. Why did agriculture catch on so fast?
It seems that agriculture was suddenly and independently adopted at several sites all around the globe, including the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, China and Mexico. From these sites it spread with considerable speed all over the planet. Today only a few isolated and insignificant populations of hunter-gatherers remain, mostly in the Southern hemisphere.
The speed at which agriculture spread from centres of original adoption may seem slow to the modern traveller, but it is remarkable by the standards of earlier innovations in prehistory. So far no satisfactory explanation has been offered for this puzzle. Most anthropologists have settled for the theory that overwhelming productivity of new technology was simply irresistible to our ancestors. But this theory doesn't seem viable bearing in mind puzzling evidence from the skeletons of the first farmers. Bone and tooth studies of some of the earliest agricultural communities in the Middle East show that farmers had worse health (due to poorer nutrition) than the hunter-gatherers who preceded them.
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