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Agriculture, Health & the Neolithic Decline

The archaeological and biological evidence that the transition to agriculture damaged human health, reduced brain size, and created new forms of disease and inequality.

27 works

Ben-Dor M (2013)

Use of animal fat as a symbol of health in traditional societies suggests humans may be well adapted to its consumption

Journal of Evolution and Health: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 10.

Ben-Dor M (2019)

How carnivorous are we? The implication for protein consumption

Journal of Evolution and Health 3(1).

Ben-Dor M, Gopher A, Hershkovitz I, Barkai R (2011)

Man the fat hunter: the demise of Homo erectus and the emergence of a new hominin lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant

PLoS ONE, December 2011, Vol 6, Issue 12:e28689.

Cohen M & Cane-Kramer G (2007)

Ancient health: skeletal indicators of agricultural and economic intensification

Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Cohen MN (1989)

Health and the rise of civilization

Yale University Press.

Cohen MN & Armelagos GJ (2013)

Paleopathology at the origins of agriculture

Gainesville FL: University of Florida Press.

Eaton SB, Konner MK, Shostak M (1988)

Stone Agers in the fast lane: chronic degenerative diseases in evolutionary perspective

The American Journal of Medicine 84 (4): 739–49.

Eaton SB, Shostak M, Konner M (1988)

The Paleolithic prescription: a program of diet and exercise and a design for living

New York: Harper and Row.

Geary D & Bailey D (2009)

Hominid brain evolution: testing climatic, ecological, and social competition models

Human Nature, 20, 265-279.

Gowdy J (2019)

Our hunter-gatherer future: climate change, agriculture, and uncivilization

Futures 115 (2020) 102488.

Gurven M & Kaplan H (2007)

Longevity among hunter-gatherers: a cross-cultural examination

Population and Development Review, 33(2), 321-365.

Hawks J (2011)

Selection for smaller brains in Holocene human evolution

John Hawks weblog, August 22nd 2011.

Henneberg M (1988)

Decrease of human skull size in the Holocene

Human Biology, 60, 395-405.

Kaplan H et al (2017)

Coronary atherosclerosis in indigenous South American Tsimane: a cross-sectional cohort study

Lancet. 2017 Apr 29;389(10080):1730-1739.

Kaplan H, Hill K, Lancaster J, Hurtado AM (2000)

A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity

Evolutionary Anthropology 9(4): 156–185.

Konner M & Eaton SB (2010)

Paleolithic nutrition twenty-five years later

Nutrition in Clinical Practice vol 25(6) 594-602.

Larsen CS (2006)

The Agricultural Revolution as environmental catastrophe: implications for health and lifestyles in the Holocene

Quaternary International, 150, 12-20.

Lyons K et al (2016)

Holocene shifts in the assembly of plant and animal communities implicate human impacts

Nature 16447.

Mithen S (2007)

Did farming arise from a misapplication of social intelligence?

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362, 705-718.

Ruff C, Trinkaus E & Holliday T (1997)

Body mass and encephalization in Pleistocene Homo

Nature, 387, 173-178.

Schindler B (2021)

Eat like a human

New York: Little Brown Spark.

Scott JC (2017)

Against the grain: a deep history of the earliest states

New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Snir A et al (2015)

The origin of cultivation and proto-weeds, long before Neolithic farming

PLoS One 10, 1-12.

Speth JD (2010)

The paleoanthropology and archaeology of big-game hunting: protein, fat, or politics?

New York: Springer Science & Business Media.

Ströhle A & Hahn A (2011)

Diets of modern hunter-gatherers vary substantially in their carbohydrate content depending on ecoenvironments: results from an ethnographic analysis

Nutrition.

Wells S (2010)

Pandora's seed: the unforeseen cost of civilization

New York: Random House.

Zeder M, Emshwiller E, Smith B, Bradley D (2017)

Documenting domestication: the intersection of genetics and archaeology

Trends in Genetics, 22:139-155.