Agriculture: A Killer for Thousands of Years

Roughly 10,000 years ago humankind went through a large transition that has forever changed the way that we all live. Our hunter-gatherer relatives began to domesticate animals and cultivate crops. A person with little knowledge of anthropology and human evolution such as I may think that this was a great, only positive advancement in the evolution of human behavior, but I have now uncovered that this advancement has its positives and negatives. It has allowed human populations to increase dramatically (a positive), but also it has exposed the human race to many diseases and hardships.

Today in every large city because of the living proximity of all the people disease and sickness spread quite easily. The same happened in ancient villages. The farming of plants and domestication of animals encouraged people to live closely. Infectious microorganisms went rampant with so many places for it to infect and disease outbreaks were very common. Ancient people had not built up defenses to these “new” diseases exposed to them. This fact lead to mass plagues and many deaths along the way. The same fact happens to the world today. For example, once Avion Flu (HPAI) finds a way to infect humans all of human will be in a compromised state because all of our bodies have not put up proper defenses against this epidemic. Farming and domestication of animals has in the past posed a threat to humans and it still does in this day and age.

Our hunter-gatherer relatives were a much healthier person than the agricultural breed. As I mentioned infections was much more rampant in the farming communities. Oral health such as tooth decay and enamel defects in hunter-gatherers was much less than their counter parts. Agriculturists did not replace the iron that many of the hunters of the past received by eating animals. Plants were much easier to produce and prepare than living creatures. Many people a result of this iron shortage became anemic because of the lack of iron in their diets. Humans had to compensate for these shortcomings in their diet so they evolved. New alleles formed to allow humans to properly digest the foods that they now relied on. A gene was now formulated through mutation that allowed the modern human to digest milk and get all of the valuable nutrients contained in it known as LCT. Even though humans in the beginning of this “Agricultural Revolution” struggled to stay as healthy as they once did as hunter-gatherers they all eventually adapted to their new environment and began to prosper.

My high school calculus teacher continually preached to us the mantra “Champions Adjust.” I now have come to realize that he truly taught across curriculums because throughout history humans are the champions. No matter what problems they encounter they always adjust.  The first they encountered was the difficulty to catch their food and find sufficient plants for their diets, so they began farming and the domestication of animals. The next problem they encountered and we still encounter today is the spread of diseases in high populated environments so they adjusted and developed immunities to these common diseases. In the future new foods will be produced and humans will find a way to eat them. The genotypes and phenotypes of humans together have allowed humans to continually advance to their respective environments and food supplies. Though agriculture has lent its fair share of problems to humans throughout the years humans have overcome these disadvantages and have become one of the most versatile and successful (in terms of survival) species on this earth.

For more information go to:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=culture-speeds-up-human-evolution

http://facstaff.unca.edu/cnicolay/cluster/disease-evol.pdf