Farming makes people shorter and sicker
Skeletons record the cost: worse teeth, more disease, more deficiency, less height.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 5.7 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 1 thousand years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
The transition to agriculture is legible in bone. Average adult stature falls, dental caries and enamel defects increase sharply as diets become starchy and monotonous, iron-deficiency anaemia and infectious lesions become common, and skeletons show the wear of repetitive labour such as grinding grain. Foragers were, by most physical measures, healthier. What farming provided was not better lives but more of them — a population that could grow, and could not go back.