The Impact of Domestication on Human Health.
After reading the two articles by Mark N. Cohen, domestications impact on human health is one of a surprising conclusion. I figured that civilization would lead to a more educated and responsible community on the subject of their health, but I was surprised to find that domestication lead to the corruption of health through malnutrition and the advancement of disease. Throughout this paper you will be given obvious examples of why Cohen made the statement, "Civilization has not been as successful in guaranteeing human well-being as we like to believe." I will start off with discussing the major health problems facing hunter-gatherers and from there on you can see why Cohen made the statement he did.
The major health problems facing hunter-gatherers was starvation and disease. The problems however, were not as serious as one might assume. You would form a hypothesis that a population with no advanced medicine or agricultural system would be a population in despair. This was not the case what so ever. The diets of hunter-gatherers appeared to be comparatively well balanced, even when they are lean. Contemporary hunter-gatherers enjoyed levels of caloric intake that compare favorably with national averages for many countries of the Third World and that are generally above those of the poor in the modern world. Ethnographic accounts of contemporary groups suggest that protein intakes are commonly quite high, comparable to those of affluent modern groups and substantially above world average. Whenever we can glimpse the remains of anatomically modern human beings who lived in early prehistoric environments still rich in large game, they are often relatively large people displaying comparatively few signs of qualitative malnutrition. The reason for such a healthy species is the almost unknown protein and vitamin deficiency in these groups.