Food for thought

[Pana]

We always hear about how the establishment of agriculture thousands of years ago did so much for the early societies. A new study puts this myth to rest as it points out that the health of the early people actually declined as they lost the diversity in their diet. It slowly bounced back:

"Dawn of Agriculture Took Toll On Health

ScienceDaily (June 18, 2011) — When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and health of the people declined.

"This broad and consistent pattern holds up when you look at standardized studies of whole skeletons in populations," says Amanda Mummert, an Emory graduate student in anthropology.
Mummert led the first comprehensive, global review of the literature regarding stature and health during the agriculture transition, to be published by the journal Economics and Human Biology.

"Many people have this image of the rise of agriculture and the dawn of modern civilization, and they just assume that a more stable food source makes you healthier," Mummert says. "But early agriculturalists experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress, probably because they became dependent on particular food crops, rather than having a more significantly diverse diet."

Continued here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 094514.htm

[Dr Exile]

Mankind was condemned to abandon his blissful existence as a wandering hunter-gatherer and toil forever more.

From "Neanderthals in North America"

http://bishoprock.org/history.html

[Royal]

There's less electricity in the food.

[IndicusMaximus]

What does the Great Pooh say about why this happened?

[IndicusMaximus]

The sound got too repetative and people became depressed and therefore began to brew beer and drink heavily.

[Cartoonsyndicate]

What is the meaning of it all?

[IndicusMaximus]

Do you remember any of your past lives? I remember being some sort of prehistoric megafauna. I had the same questions then as I do now. What...the...hell? And then I died.

What does that mean?

It means that I'm just talking to hear the typing of my own fingers.

[Cartoonsyndicate]

We are all nothing more than little plaints in the void.

[Royal]

We are all nothing more than little plaints in the void.

[lkwalker]

Mike O'Hare

God visits a man and tells him he must give up smoking, drinking and sex if he wants to get into Heaven. The man says he’ll try. God visits him a week later to see how he’s getting on. “Not bad” says the man, “I’ve given up drinking and smoking, but when the wife bent over the freezer, I had to fuck her up the arse.” “They don’t like that sort of thing in Heaven” said God. The man replied, “They’re not too fucking happy about it in Woolworths either!