An Edible History of Humanity Read Online Free Page B

seventy-five different types of wild plants, rather than relying on a few staple crops.
     Cereal grains provide reliable calories, but they do not contain the full range of essential nutrients.
    So farmers were shorter than hunter-gatherers. This can be determined from skeletal remains by comparing the “dental” age
     derived from the teeth with the “skeletal” age implied by the lengths of the long bones. A skeletal age that is lower than
     the dental age is evidence of stunted growth due to malnutrition. Skeletal evidence from Greece and Turkey suggests that at
     the end of the last ice age, around 14,000 years ago, the average height of hunter-gatherers was five feet nine inches for
     men and five feet five inches for women. By 3000 B.C., after the adoption of farming, these averages had fallen to five feet
     three inches for men and five feet for women. It is only in modern times that humans have regained the stature of ancient
     hunter-gatherers, and only in the richest parts of the world. Modern Greeks and Turks are still shorter than their Stone Age
     ancestors.
    In addition, many diseases damage bones in characteristic ways, and evidence from studies of bones reveals that farmers suffered
     from various diseases of malnutrition that were rare or absent in hunter-gatherers. These include rickets (vitamin D deficiency),
     scurvy (vitamin C deficiency), and anemia (iron deficiency). Farmers were also more susceptible to infectious diseases such
     as leprosy, tuberculosis, and malaria as a result of their settled lifestyles. And their dependence on cereal grains had other
     specific consequences: female skeletons often display evidence of arthritic joints and deformities of the toes, knees, and
     lower back, all of which are associated with the daily use of a saddle quern to grind grain. Dental remains show that farmers
     suffered from tooth decay, unheard of in hunter-gatherers, because the carbohydrates in the farmers’ cereal-heavy diets were
     reduced to sugars by enzymes in their saliva as they chewed. Life expectancy, which can also be determined from skeletons,
     also fell: Evidence from the Illinois River Valley shows that average life expectancy at birth fell from twenty-six for hunter-gatherers
     to nineteen for farmers.
    At some archaeological sites it is possible to follow health trends as hunter-gatherers become more sedentary and eventually
     adopt farming. As the farming groups settle down and grow larger, the incidence of malnutrition, parasitic diseases, and infectious
     diseases increases. At other sites, it is possible to compare the condition of hunter-gatherers and farmers living alongside
     each other. The settled farmers are invariably less healthy than their free-roaming neighbors. Farmers had to work much longer
     and harder to produce a less varied and less nutritious diet, and they were far more prone to disease. Given all these drawbacks,
     why on earth did people take up farming?

    THE ORIGINS OF FARMING
    The short answer is that they did not realize what was happening until it was too late. The switch from hunting and gathering
     to farming was a gradual one from the perspective of individual farmers, despite being very rapid within the grand scheme
     of human history. For just as wild crops and domesticated crops occupy a continuum, there is a range from pure hunter-gatherer
     to relying entirely on farmed foods.
    Hunter-gatherers sometimes manipulate ecosystems to increase the availability of food, though such behavior falls far short
     of the deliberate large-scale cultivation we call farming. Using fire to clear land and prompt new growth, for example, is
     a practice that goes back at least 35,000 years. Australian aborigines, one of the few remaining groups of hunter-gatherers
     to have survived into modern times, plant seeds on occasion to increase the availability of food when they return to a particular
     site a few months later. It would be an exaggeration to call this