Civilization's Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health

摘要

When humans were freed from searching for food from dawn to dusk, they finally had time to build cities, create art, and even muse about the gods. Agriculture and cities made human life better, right? Wrong, say archaeologists who presented stunning new evidence that most people's health deteriorated over the past 3000 years. "We document a general decline in health across Europe and the Mediterranean," says bioar-chaeologist Clark Spencer Larsen of OhiornState University in Columbus. He's a co-investigator of the European Global History of Health Project, an ambitious new effort to study the health of Europeans during the past 10,000 years.