Learning Daily

There are three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. Today, just three plants wheat, rice, and corn provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life. Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.