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I.2 - Paleopathological Evidence of Malnutrition
- from Part I - Determining What Our Ancestors Ate
- Edited by Kenneth F. Kiple, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
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- Book:
- The Cambridge World History of Food
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 07 December 2000, pp 34-44
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Summary
The quantity and nutritional quality of food available to human populations undoubtedly played a major role in the adaptive processes associated with human evolution. This should have been particularly the case in that period of human history from Mesolithic times to the present when epochal changes took place in the subsistence base of many human societies. In the Near East the domestication of plants and animals began toward the end of the Mesolithic period but became fully developed in the Neolithic. This development included agriculture and pastoralism along with cultural changes associated with greater sedentism and urbanism.
Paleopathology, primarily through the study of human skeletal remains, has attempted to interpret the impact such changes have had upon human health. A recent focus has been on the transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to one associated with incipient or fully developed agriculture (e. g., Cohen and Armelagos 1984b; Cohen 1989; Meiklejohn and Zvelebil 1991). One of the questions being asked is whether greater dependence on fewer food sources increased human vulnerability to famine and malnutrition. The later transition into an increasingly sedentary urban existence in the Bronze and Iron Ages has not been as carefully studied. However, analysis of data from skeletal remains in numerous archaeological sites is providing insight into some of the effects upon nutrition that increasing human density and attendant subsistence changes have had.
In the study of prehistoric health, perhaps the least complex nutritional data comes from human remains that have been mummified. Preservation of human soft tissues occurs either naturally, as in the bogs of northern Europe and very arid areas of the world, or through cultural intervention with embalming methods. Some mummies have provided direct evidence of diet from the intestinal contents of their stomachs (e.g., Glob 1971: 42–3; Fischer 1980: 185–9; Brothwell 1986: 92). However, the most ubiquitous source of data comes from human skeletal remains where the impact of dietary factors tends to be indirect, limited, and difficult to interpret.
V.1 - Diseases in the Pre-Roman World
- from Part V - The History of Human Disease in the World Outside Asia
- Edited by Kenneth F. Kiple, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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- Book:
- The Cambridge World History of Human Disease
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 29 January 1993, pp 245-261
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Summary
In the past 15,000 years, epochal social and cultural changes have created fundamentally different relationships between humankind and the environment. One of the most important innovations has been the domestication of plants and animals, a major factor in the gradual establishment of agriculture as the world’s predominant economic base. The development of agriculture brought an increase in sedentism, in which human groups lived in more or less permanent communities.
Associated with farming was the domestication of animals and, in some societies, nomadic pastoralism. By about 6000 B.C., animal husbandry provided a relatively widespread and stable source of high-quality protein in the Near East. Moreover, the protein was typically produced in ways that did not compete directly for agricultural land resources. Domestic herds grazed on agricultural land after the harvest (Bentley 1987) or on land that was fallow, marginal, or inadequate for farming.
The greater control that agriculture and the domestication of animals gave people over food production resulted in food surpluses. Surplus food created the potential for the emergence of specialists such as craftsmen, merchants, and a ruler class, which are essential components of urban society, another major social change. Urbanism began in the Near East during the Chalcolithic Age (c. 4000–3200 B.C.) but had its major efflorescence during the Early Bronze Age (c. 3200–2000 B.C.)
The advent of agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the development of urbanism had a significant impact on human health. Although agriculture dramatically increased the calories that could be produced by a given individual, the emphasis on a few cultigens increased the vulnerability of agricultural societies to famine and malnutrition (Cohen 1984a).
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