"The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered." - Jare

"The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered." - Jared Diamond [0] "Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price was continually struck by the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern commerce” such as sugar, white flour, canned foods and condensed milk. Nowhere was the contrast more evident than in Africa. In addition to their susceptibility to chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, intestinal problems, appendicitis, gall and kidney stones and endocrinological dysfunction, the Whites also showed little resistance to infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, lice and flies. “In all the districts, it was recognized and expected that the foreigners must plan to spend a portion of every few years or every year outside that environment if they would keep well. Children born in that country to Europeans were generally expected to spend several of their growing years in Europe or America if they would build even relatively normal bodies.”1 By contrast, the native Africans exhibited a very high tolerance to infectious disease including malaria carried by mosquitos, typhus and fevers transmitted by lice and sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly." [1] "The remarkable metabolic and cardiovascular health of hunter-gatherers and other small-scale populations has long made them attractive models in public health. Given the similarity in health profiles across ethnic groups, it is clearly their environments, rather than genetics, that keep people within small-scale societies so healthy. Indeed, from Australia to the Americas, these populations develop the same metabolic and cardiovascular ‘diseases of civilization’ when they move away from traditional lifestyles and adopt Western diets and activity levels 46." [2] "Indeed, the modal age at death for hunter-gatherer populations examined by Gurven and Kaplan is ~72 years (range: 68–78 years), near the value for the US population (85 years) in 2002." [2] "Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter–gatherers actually had significantly less—not more—famine than other subsistence modes." [3] "Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9″ for men, 5’ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3″ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors." [0] [0] http://www.meissinger.com/uploads/3/4/9/1/34919185/diamond_worst_mistake.pdf http://www.meissinger.com/uploads/3/4/9/1/34919185/diamond_w... [1] https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets/out-of-africa-what-dr-price-dr-burkitt-discovered-in-their-studies-of-sub-saharan-tribes/ https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12785 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12785 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/