Portuguese Teeth and Skeletal Pathologies – the Agricultural Revolution and the Metaphysics of Decline

Studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers as they transition from traditional to modern lifestyles reveal a marked reduction in their health and in the nutritional adequacy of their newly acquired diets.  In addition to studies on extant populations, in the last few decades there is an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how environmental stressors and limited resources translates into pathologies detectable in ancient bones.  This has led to an especially interesting range of investigations by archeologists on populations before and after the Agricultural Revolution starting over 10,000 years ago.  Studies on the recently settled and on old bones may answer the perplexing question of why after the seeming ecological stability of the ancient human lifestyles (lasting, after all, from 200,000 to a mere 10,000 years ago) did the transition from hunter-gatherer modes of existence to an agricultural lifestyle occur at all?

Trugernanner (1812–1876)

The diet of Australian Aborigines has been reasonably well studied.  The modern self-selected diet of Australian aborigines reflects that of the cattle stations where many lived after the colonization of Australia by White pastoralists.[i]  Accompanying these dietary changes were disimprovements in Aborigine’s health – increased prevalence of hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease in adults was noted, as were low child birth weights, and increased childhood morbidity.  

The traditional diet for aboriginal Ngatatjara people, for instance, in the Western Desert was primarily vegetarian supplemented with small game; hunting was largely unsuccessful despite the effort.  Station diets consisted of flour, meat, sugar (usually consumed in tea) and powdered milk.  There was very little fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, cheese, and butter, though individuals supplemented their diets with “bush tucker” and with purchases from neighboring towns.  Ironically, the food at the stations may have reflected the food priorities of hunter-gathers with the ready availability of meat.  However, in the absence of other food items and the increasingly sedentary nature of their lifestyles and the “emotional stresses associated with dispossession” resulted in declining health.[ii] 

Civilization and its contents: how the world’s earliest cities manifest Neolithic carnal excesses

V. Gordon Chile (1892 - 1957)

“Libraries”, Foucault said, “are the habitat of Man.”  I was in a university library when I read this.  It was the Arts library at UCD in Belfield, south of Dublin city center, and I sat there, circa 1985, cloistered from a damp Dublin evening, digesting the dinner of an impecunious scholar – chips and sausage and a tin of mackerel.  The city, the university, the library, the book in my hand, calories from domesticated foodstuff, and even the lifestyle of writer and reader are part of a cluster of innovations that are all relatively recent in the making.  It was all so very civilized.  In fact, city, university, reader and writer, are some of the principles ingredients of civilization. 

   

Robert Bierstedt, a sociologist, reflected on those items that might serve as indices of civilization; his list is edifying and frustrating.   “Trousers and Bibles”, he said, “-these surely are unmistakable indices of civilization!”  His list  then proceeds by including traditional and less traditional indicators, for instance: “language, literacy, law, soap, paper, the wheel, money, government, religion, science, agriculture, the city, commerce, print, the domestication of animals, the breeding of cattle, the use of milk, the digging stick, the use of the fork, plumbing, dental caries, and even the dry martini.”[i]