From some private correspondence I recently got from Steve Meyers, reposted
here with permission:

 --[snip]--

Along those lines, I recently read an interesting article that
summarizes a number of studies in the 1980s that used skeletal
analysis to look at relative pathology of various groups of
(late) hunter-gatherers and early cultivators.
The data are not entirely conclusive, but
generally point in the direction of better health for the HGers.

Mark Cohen, The significance of long-term changes in human diet
and food economy, in Harris and Ross (eds), Food and Evolution (1987).

Steve

BTW -- I'll be off on vacation for much of December, so the absence
of postings from me doesn't mean I've lost interest.

 --[snip]--

...I thought the reference might be a bit dated, and no doubt more
such studies have been done since this guy's review, but perhaps it's
still relevant. His motivation is trying to sort out whether the
increasingly broad spectrum of food resources utilized from Late Paleolithic
to Mesolithic to Neolithic was more a function of need ("stress") rather
than progress; he tends to be of the "stress" school, and this review
tends to support this view.

BTW, there is another good article in the same book:
Katherine Milton, Primate diets and gut morpholgy: implications for
hominid evolution.

Steve