| Abstract: |
As a whole, indicators of health among h-g and farmers fairly clearly suggest an overall decline in the quality - and probably in the length - of human life associated with the adoption of agriculture. It should be stressed that the h-g/farmer comparison lumps together a number of separate adaptive shifts whose importance in accounting for the changes in health is not always clear. The effects of population growth, of new foods, of farming as an activity, or sedentism, of the dispersal or nucleation of settlements, and of changing politics al need to be evaluated separately. pg 595 Although the data point fairly clearly to a decline in health associated the origin of agriculture, it is not yet clear whether they confirm the particulars of the (Boserupian) populations pressure model of agricultural origins. Generally negative slope of health and nutrition do conform to the model. Moreover, population growth is identified as a concomitant of changes in health and economy in most of the sequences (although not in all portions of all sequences) of preagricultural economic changes inmost regions discussed is consistent with predictions about economic changes associated with increasing population density and/or resources (Christenson 1980
Cohen 1977
Earle 1980
Hespenheide 1980
O'Connell and Hawkes 1981
Winterhalder 1981). On the other hand, the data, though mixed, suggest an overall decline in work load and physical stress that may have helped to motivate the economic transition, reducing the necessity to postulate declining resources and/or growing populations as a necessary stimulus to economic change. pg 596 A population pressure model would predict increasing or least steady rates of such indicators among h-g associated with growing populations and changing economic strategies, since it would suggest that new food economies wrought no net improvement in economic homeostasis. Taken together, these indicators (Harris Line and Enamel hypoplasia) suggest no net improvement over time in health or economic homeostasis.
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