[This one is the one you really want to save.  One of the
objections that people have to our diet is that "NeanderThals only lived
to be about 30."  Combined with the information on centigenarians from Ray
Audette, this should provide a smashing thesis for why our diet is more
conducive for long and healthy life]


                        HUMANS WERE LONGED LIVED

        Another, more immediate aspect of agriculture, brought to light
increasingly in recent years, involved the physical well--being of its
subjects.  Lee and Devore's reseachers show that "the diet of gathering
peoples was far better than cultivators, that starvation is rare, that
their health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower
incidence of chronic disease."  Conversely, Farb summarized, "Production
provides an inferior diet based on a limited number of foods, is much less
reliable because of blights and vagaries of weather, and is much more
costly in terms of human labor expended."
        The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic
conclusions, stressing, as does Angel, the "sharp decline in growth and
nutrition" caused by the changeover from food gathering to food
production.  Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised.
Although eye-witness Spanish accounts of the 16th century tell of Florida
Indian fathers seeing their fifth generation before passing away, it was
long believed that primitive people dies in their 30's and 40's.  Robson,
Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity with life
expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring injury
and severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries.
During the industrial age fairly recently did like span lengthen for the
species, and it is now widely recognized that in Paleolithic times humans
were long-lived, once certain risks were passed.  DeVries is correct in
his judgement that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with
civilization.
        "Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of
farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities," wrote
Jared Diamond.  Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity,
and nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture.
Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of
domestication and culture.  Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental
carries, and mental disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of
agriculture; previously women have birth with little difficulty and little
or no pain.
        People were far more alive in all their senses.  !Kung San,
reported H. R. Post, have heard a single-engine plane while it was still
70 miles away, and many of them  can see four moons of Jupiter with the
naked eye.  The summary judgement of Harris and Ross, as to "an overall
decline in the quality -- and probably the length -- of human life among
farmers compared with earlier hunter-gatherer groups," is understated.
        One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was
once a Golden Age of innocence before history began. Hessiod, for
instance, referred to the "life-sustaining soul, which yeilded its copious
fruits unbribed by toil."  Eden was clearly the home of hunter-gatherers
and the yearning expressed by the historical imaged of paradise must have
been that is disillusioned tillers of soul for a lost life of freedom and
relative ease.
        A history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of
nature from human experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food
choices.  According to Rooney, prehistoric peoples found sustenance in
over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas, "All civilization," Wenke
reminds us, "have been bassed on the cultivation of one or more of just
six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes."
        It is a striking truth that over the centuries "the number of
different edible foods which are actually eaten," Pyke points out, "has
steadily dwindled."  The world's population now depends on most of its
subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains
are replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants
becomes far less varied.
        The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the
proportion of manufactured foods increases.  Today the very same articles
of diet are distributed worldwide so that an Inuit Eskimo and an African
native may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or
frozen fish sticks from a single factory in Sweden.  A few big
multinationals such as Unilever, the world's biggest food production
company, preside over a highly integrated service system in which the
object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing
consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the world.
        When Descartes enunciated the principle of the fullest
exploitation of matter to ANY use is the whole duty of man, our separation
from nature was virtually complete and the stage was set for the
Industrial Revolution.  Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit
lingers in the person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France's Museum of Natural
History, who pronounced that our species, "because of intellect," can no
longer recross a certain threshold of civilization and once again become
part of a natural habitat.  He further states, expressing perfectly the
original and persevering imperialism of agriculture, "As the earth in its
primitive state is not adopted to our expansion, man must shackle it to
fulfill human destiny."
        The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model,
indicating again that at base all mass production is farming.  The natural
world is to be broken and forced to work.  One thinks of the mid-American
prairies were settlers had to yoke six oxen to a plow in order to cut
through the soul for the first time.  Or from a scene in the 1870s in THE
OCTOPUS by Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were driven like "a great
column of field artillery" across the San Joaquin Valley, cutting 175
furrows at once.