Mark Nathan Cohen

Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture

In 1982, the Conference on Paleopathology and Socioeconomic Change at the Origins of Agriculture was held in Plattsburgh, New York, to examine previously untested theories about how the adoption of agriculture had impacted human health. The collection of those conference proceedings transformed into this landmark book that set the standard for how to collect, analyse, and interpret osteological data in the study of health transitions. Using skeletal pathologies, the contributors examine how the transition from foraging to farming affected human health and nutrition. Now back in print and for the first time in paperback, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture is a foundational piece in bioarchaeological literature and a central source of information regarding the impact of early farming on socioeconomic evolution. It remains a highly cited reference for archaeologists and physical anthropologists. Contributors present data from nineteen different regions before, during, and after agricultural transitions, analysing populations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and South America while primarily focusing on North America. A wide range of health indicators are discussed, including mortality, episodic stress, physical trauma, degenerative bone conditions, isotopes, and dental pathology.

Symbiosis, Instability, and the Origins and Spread of Agriculture: A New Model [and Comments and Reply]

Section 1 presents evidence that domestication and agriculture are evolutionary phenomena. They may be found in the relationships of many animals with plants. Domestication is the result of coevolved mutualisms between animals and plants. All domesticated plants show characteristics that are evidence of this mutualist relationship. Section 2 is a brief presentation of a model for the origin and spread of agriculture. Agricultural techniques transcend the environmental limitations placed upon the continued development of the human-plant mutualism. First highly mutualistic societies and then agricultural societies, because of greater potential cultural fecundity, come to dominate any given geographical area. This higher potential fecundity is based upon increases in the carrying capacity brought about by the domesticated plant. Agriculture also introduces new instabilities into the productivity of domesticated plants. Recurrent periods of stress, the result of agricultural techniques and plants, bring about the spread of agricultural societies by forcing a subset of the population to emigrate. Agricultural practices maximizing instability in productivity will have the highest rates of dispersal. Thus a positive selection for instability in productivity has characterized agricultural systems from their very origin.

Introduction: Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture

The papers in this special section are revised contributions to one of the Conversations in the Disciplines funded by the State University of New York and the SUNY College at Plattsburgh, held in Plattsburgh on October 7–9, 2007. This discussion, titled “The Origins of Agriculture,” brought together scholars with diverse perspectives and methodological approaches on the origins of agriculture. My perception is that the many perspectives and methodologies are not in sufficient contact with one another, and my goal in organizing this collection for the SUNY Conversation and for this special section in Current Anthropology was to generate cross-fertilization of ideas. The areas in question include ancient health, paleopathology, paleonutrition, paleodemography, evolutionary theory, genetics, political prehistory, social organization, climatology, human behavioral ecology, archaeobotany, and Neolithic demographic transition theory. As these papers demonstrate, the conversation was successful to a degree in that regard, even though, as is inevitable, we reached no consensus. My perspective was then and is now that such widespread common events require relatively simple common core events and causes. To argue otherwise defies the odds of coincidence given the enormously widespread complex sequences of events occurring in parallel but independently in so many regions of the world. I suggested that we resembled the proverbial blind men, each describing an elephant from the perspective of his or her own incomplete experience. (Hence the reference to elephants in some accompanying papers.) I still insist that there is an “elephant,” or common core of events, despite our various incomplete perspectives; however, many participants do not agree that the elephant or core understanding exists. What follows is my own perspective on the problem, modified and updated by more recent research and, most recently, by participation in the conversation. I take pride of place as organizer and also as the person providing the most primitive, albeit drastically updated, hypothesis. In The Food Crisis in Prehistory (Cohen 1977), I proposed

The Osteological Paradox Reconsidered

ter, and Sontz I97I; Gallagher I977; Hayden I977, I979) that the rules may be so lax (at least with regard to the overall morphology of the lithic artifacts) that the archaeologist may be unable to ascertain from the lithics that they were made according to such rules. I suspect (although I do not speak as a lithics specialist) that we recognize the symbolic nature of the archaeological record of early Upper Paleolithic Europe more from its decorative and representational art than from its lithics. Nevertheless, I am in complete agreement with Byerss interpretation of the Middle-to-Upper-Paleolithic transition in Europe with the one exception that there are more kinds or levels of symbolic behavior than he mentions and that the origins of language are as important to understand as the origins of symbolic culture. Above all, I am encouraged to see a scholar from outside Paleolithic archaeology taking a serious and anything but naive interest in what archaeology has to offer. If we archaeologists can return the compliment by taking a serious and ideally not too naive interest in what other disciplines have to tell us about the evolution of human culture and of the human mind, our discipline will benefit enormously.

Implications of the NDT for World Wide Health and Mortality in Prehistory

This chapter discusses the significance of the NDT model in particular and of broad explanatory hypotheses in general. Various questions are raised about the aspects of the model, particularly about the timing of the NDT, the causes of increasing fertility, and the resulting pattern of increasing mortality. Data are presented demonstrating diminishing returns for labor in bringing food to the table in economies preceding and accompanying the adoption of agriculture. Also discussed are data from paleopathology indicating that health commonly declined during the same transitions.