Health and the rise of civilization

Abstract

The reviewer's burden is a light one when the book to be reviewed is bad.Then he can rock along comfortably, pointing to one egregious error of fact or misstep of interpretation after another.But a very good book is an onerous problem: book review editors frown at squeals of delight, however justified, and the quoting of one nugget of wisdom after another soon becomes a bore.Mark Cohen's latest, Health and the rise of civilization, is, therefore, a problem.The book is as provocative as his groundbreaking Thefood crisis inprehistory, and as useful to the bleary-eyed student of the human experience in its largest dimensions as two other recent and admirable works, Stephen Boyden's Western civilization in biological perspective and Thomas McKeown's The origins ofhuman disease.The text, 142 pages, is blessedly brief and crystal-clear, and most of the technical discussion about the numerous controversial matters it touches upon is relegated to the 82 pages of endnotes.For readers who want to pursue matters further, the bibilography is massive, 45 pages' worth.Neither the busy scholar nor the general reader could ask for a better introduction to the enormous subject of the consonances and dissonances of civilization and the anatomies and physiologies we inherited from our hunter and gatherer ancestors.Some anthropologists, tape recorder or camel's hair brush in hand, build careers on the meticulous examination or disinterment of a single village.Cohen seizes whole continents and millennia-the entire Neolithic, for instance-as his bailiwick.In this book he exercises his knowledge, logic, and wisdom to answer the momentous question, what did and is civilization doing to our birth, morbidity, and mortality rates, and to our general health?Once upon a time many of us believed in a golden age in the past in which youthful vitality was prolonged far into middle age, and death came late and with dignity.Then, in the nineteenth century, most of us signed on as Darwinists and embraced Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of social evolution as a step by step progress upward from savagery to civilization, with the obvious implication that health improved and longevity of life increased with every such step.The thought that the growth or acquiring of civilization has been and still can be disastrous still strikes many as a contradiction in terms.For several decades archaeologists, physical and cultural anthropologists, physicians, epidemiologists, demographers, historians, and observers in general have produced a large but