Early agriculture’s toll on human health

It is difficult to envision a world without agriculture. However, as recently as 10 millennia ago, only in the Near East had people turned from hunting and gathering to agriculture as a means of supporting themselves. One such place was Catalhoyuk in modern-day Turkey, the subject of Larsen et al.’s (1) work reported in PNAS (Fig. 1). Several more millennia would pass before a reliance on domesticated plants and animals became commonplace in both the Old and New Worlds.Fig. 1. Many burials have been found at Catalhoyuk, such as this one being excavated, among building remnants, also shown. Image courtesy of the Catalhoyuk Research Project/Jason Quinlan.Growing plants and tending animals increased yields per hectare, notably the caloric return, although doing so necessitated greater labor inputs and investments in the land itself. Settlement patterns and societal organization changed to accommodate new demands on labor, such as when planting, harvesting, and herding animals. While more food could be produced locally, much of it stored for lean seasons, agricultural economies were a mixed blessing. Diets became monotonous, and a narrower range of food courted disaster from failed harvests. More people packed together for longer periods increased the risk of disease from contaminated water, food, and soil. Social mechanisms, eventually greatly elaborated, developed to adjudicate disputes, dampening tensions that could tear communities apart. People had to defend themselves, their land, and stored food from neighboring groups because it was no longer easy to move away from sources of conflict. Variation in land quality and labor availability contributed to greater inequities among social groups than had ever existed before.It is also widely accepted that agriculture exacted a steep price in human health, an idea that had its origin in separate research efforts decades ago. In the 1960s, studies of societies that pursued traditional ways … [↵][1]1Email: ost{at}psu.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1