Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free

by Wednesday Martin

Archaeological evidence and human remains suggest that the shift from foraging to farming was anything but a straightforward improvement for our ancestors on measures like lifestyle and health. Indeed, the popular anthropologist and author Jared Diamond, pulling no punches, has called the shift to agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered” and “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Our new diet—carbohydrate intensive, iron deficient—led to reduced growth and development. It didn’t help that soil depletion and soil exhaustion eventually created crops low in nutrients. Meanwhile, neighboring farmers competed for resources, including water and farmland. Such competition and food storage birthed the concept of property; this in turn led to conflict over who controlled it. Living in close proximity to other humans, farm animals, and human and animal waste exposed our Holocene ancestors to new diseases—TB, syphilis, and nonspecific bone infections, to name a few—and polluted their water sources. Heavy dependence on a diet of grains changed facial morphology—smaller jaws meant malocclusions of teeth and infections that created serious health threats.