Additional Video Links

The following video links are highly relevant to several of the topics discussed throughout these blogs and provide substantive summary and elaboration.

History of Man. From hunter gatherer to agricultural

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdYH8m6HOCo&feature=related

Neolithic part I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEm6LWh8D_s

Neolithic part II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1xk81bwIGQ&feature=related

Agriculture: Causing Health Problems for 10,000 Years

The transition of early humans from a hunter-gatherer life style to an agricultural one has led to the formation of a wide variety of health problems. It increased the spread of disease and created settled groups which led to increased conflict. In addition, the advent of agriculture has caused serious health problems which can still be seen in humans today. These include: dental problems, infection, abnormal growth and development, and decreased height.

Agriculture has generally been considered a good thing for humanity’s growth and development. “Pathology and other evidence from human remains reveal, however, that the shift from foraging to farming had generally negative consequences for lifestyle and health.” The changes to the workload and make-up of food that resulted from the creation of agriculture were negative for the health of humanity.

The masticatory functional hypothesis says that the form of the skull began to change because of reduced demands on the chewing muscles. This craniofacial change, which is basically a reduction in the size of the face, jaws, and masticatory chewing muscles, is a direct result of agriculture which caused people to eat softer foods. Eating softer meals seems like it would be a bonus for humanity’s health. Unfortunately it was not.

The eating of softer foods led to a reduced size in the face and mouth. The smaller mouth size caused an increase in malocclusion. This basically means dental alignment problems such as overbites and underbites. These problems have caused the creation of orthodontics. Since, the size of teeth is determined by genetics and the size of our jaws and muscles are determined by environmental factors, they have not stayed in proportion with one another. In other words the many problems we have with our teeth can be directly associated with the softer foods created by agriculture. Softer foods led to a smaller jaw size while the size of the teeth stayed the same. This directly caused the overcrowding such as the necessary removal of our wisdom teeth. Other problems that this has led to are: jaw misalignment, crooked teeth, and chewing problems.

Agriculture has also led to an increase in injuries which led to an increase of infections. This increase was caused by crowded settlements. “Anthropologists find, however, a general increase in periosteal reactions on the limb bones of skeletons from crowded settings in the Holocene.” A periosteal reaction is the inflammatory response of a bone’s covering most likely caused by infection of trauma.

Height also had a definite decrease after the advent of farming. This could have been a result of limited resources or perhaps an increase in stress. Being smaller, however, was not an indication of being healthier. In fact, evidence seems to point the opposite way. Many populations who had decreased height also had a higher tendency to have infectious disease, malnutrition, and anemia. Regardless of the cause, it is clear that people simply stopped growing as tall as they had been.

Agriculture has played an important role in the development of the human race. Unfortunately, it has had many negative effects on us along with the good such as poor health. For the advancement of human evolution, though, the advent of agriculture was a necessary evil and we would not be where we are today without it.

Sources:

http://www4.gvsu.edu/coler/GPY235/Readings/CivilizationsCostTheDeclineAndFallOfHumanHealthSCIENCE1May2009.pdf

Our Origins, by Clark Spencer Larsen

Agriculture: The Origin of Human Conflict

The advent of agriculture drastically changed the way that humanity lived on the face of the Earth. It created more stable groups, allowed for increased lifespan, and increased the population. However, the advent of agriculture had negative effects as well; it can be linked to the rise of human conflict and in extension a newfound mechanism of human death.

The advent of agriculture switched the lifestyle of early humans from nomadic to static. Originally humans constantly moved to find food, but with the rise of agriculture they were forced to settle down to control the growth of their crops. Agriculture’s potential for supporting large numbers of people living in a concentrated setting, and its potential for creating surplus and thus wealth for some, laid the foundation for the great civilizations of the past. In other words, the beginning of agriculture increased population while allowing for the first notions of group wealth. This concept of wealth and a rising population lead to a rise in the scale of conflict beyond anything that had been seen before.

Agriculture created the first complex societies. Domestication fueled humans’ population growth in the Holocene, and it formed the foundation for the rise of complex societies, cities, and increasingly sophisticated technology. With domesticated plants and animals people started living in larger and larger groups. With a reliable food source people were no longer starving and had much more stable food supply. This increased the chances of survival of all members of a group. This greater survival led to greater numbers.

Food, however, was still the most important commodity for early humans. As groups increased in size the need for larger food supplies rose. The amount of land and resources that could originally sustain a population was no longer adequate for the constantly increasing demands. Early humans had no choice but to expand. Land was the way to obtain more amounts of food. Farms had to be extended. Neighboring groups soon came into conflicts as territories encroached upon one another. Eventually conflicts began to erupt more and more frequently. These fights were fought with the lives of those in the society and so maintaining a large group of people became increasingly paramount. The only way to maintain such a large group was through increasing agriculture which became synonymous with increasing amounts of land. To expand demanded more people which demanded more land which cyclically demanded more land. Agriculture and the land became the key to survival. Land became the essence of wealth.

Because of this inherent need to continue acquiring land, conflict between different populations broke out. With the continued acquisition of land, settlements grew into each other and the struggle to control more resources began. With the increased population pressure continuously demanding greater amounts of food, a society’s ability to control more and more land became paramount for survival. Because of this conflicting struggle for resources, the rise of agriculture can be said to have directly brought about the rise of organized warfare between the earliest human societies. While agriculture is often fairly credited for forming the basis upon which sizeable human congregation and urbanization began, it can also be credited for creating the environment upon which human conflict originated. While agriculture can still be said to have played a significantly positive role in the advancement of human evolution, it can also be said to have provided the mechanism upon which millions of people would be killed throughout the course of human history.

Sources:

http://www.questionswithanswer.com/what/what_were_the_changes_brought_by_the_agricultural_revolution.html

http://bss.sfsu.edu/mwilliams/hist110/lectures/hist110L1.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16463113