Is agriculture bad for your health?

Source: Dental Anthropology

By studying the fossilized bones of long-dead humans, physical anthropologists can determine the course of our species’ evolution. But those fossils, which often include bones deformed by lesions and distinctly unhealthy teeth, also allow anthropologists to speculate on the health and the lifestyles of our distant ancestors.
Individual anthropologists have long speculated that health declined with the invention of agriculture, but that was based on examining remains from isolated locations such as burial sites. A research project called A History of Health in Europe over the Past 10,000 Years has been computerizing a large collection of data from 72 researchers.
Contrary to what we would intuitively expect, fossil evidence confirms the conjecture that human health went into a serious decline with the advent of agriculture. Health continued to decline through the Middle Ages, and it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that it started to improve. By studying these patterns, which are often related to changes in diet, anthropologists hope to apply what they’re learning to the future of human health.

What do fossil remains tell us about the health and daily lives of our ancestors?

Skeletal remains provide a number of clues about human health. Physical trauma and dental health are pretty easy to observe. Variations in height can indicate whether food was adequate for growth during childhood. By analyzing bone specimens, scientists can even determine what people ate. Bones also reveal degenerative joint disease, and some bone changes indicate anemia.
Fossils and other archaeological findings also allow anthropologists to speculate on the number of people living in a settlement as well as the main source of their food and their social and economic status. This provides clues to lifestyle: Were these people rich or poor, urban or rural, and did they engage in farming or hunter-gathering.

Lifestyles of the Dead and Fossilized

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” 1555

Source: Galeria

Pulling together the evidence collected so far, anthropologists observe a marked decline in health about 3000 years ago, at a time when agriculture became widely adopted throughout Europe. (The cultivation of crops was actually “invented” several times and goes back at least 10,000 years.) Evidence includes an increase in skeletal lesions from tuberculosis and leprosy, probably caused by living in close quarters with domesticated livestock and being exposed to the accumulated waste products present in human settlements. When people live close to animals and close to each other, conditions are ideal for contagious diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms. Most ancient cities were periodically devastated by epidemics.

The advantage of agriculture is that the food supply becomes more dependable, but a grain-based diet means people eat more sugars and consume a narrower variety of nutrients. Compared to the days of hunting and gathering, post-agricultural skulls show more missing teeth and there are more cavities in the teeth that remain. There’s an increase in vitamin deficiency diseases, such as rickets and scurvy, and there are more bone infections. Height began to decline 3000 years ago, and humans continued to get shorter over time. Between 400 BCE and the 17th century, average height declined almost three inches.
Living in towns and eating food grown on farms was unhealthy. Why, anthropologists wonder, would people live in towns if it made them sick? Fossil evidence indicates that villagers experienced less bone trauma than hunter-gatherers, which suggests greater safety in numbers. As villages grew into towns, however, a social hierarcy emerged and an elite group could control access to food. The decline in height suggests that children – at least nonelite children — were not getting enough nutritious food.
A description of these findings in Science Magazine reports: “The social and political inequities in urban centers meant that for nonelites, moving into cities was ‘almost a death sentence’ for centuries.” Even in the Middle Ages people who lived in the countryside were generally taller than those who lived in the cities.

Health improves in the mid-19th century, but for how long?

The evidence indicates that health declined in classical antiquity, as Greek and Roman civilizations began their rise, and in the “Dark Ages” that followed the decline of the Roman Empire. Only in the mid-19th century did humans begin to grow taller. There could be several explanations: Increased food production at the end of the Little Ice Age, more trade with other countries, better sanitation, and the development of medicine.
If we follow the data into the 20th century, however, anthropologists note a decline in health since the 1950s. Could the cause be similar to the decline observed 3000 years ago? Today economic and political forces favor the production and consumption of foods such as high fructose corn syrup. The diet of Americans, who are increasingly overweight, is low in quality. To some anthropologists this is reminiscent of those early farmers who switched to eating grain rather than the diverse and nutritious diet of hunter-gatherers.
The more things change ….

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