Artikkel: Agriculture: The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race

[sirib]

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/22...The-Human-Race

En veldig lang artikkel om overgangen fra jeger/sanker-samfunn til bondesamfunn og om dette i det hele tatt var et smart trekk for menneskeheten. Ett av momentene som nevnes er(og da er det første årsak nevnt som er interessant i lavkarbo-sammenheng):

"There are at least 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 one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate 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 crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.