Bone Verse

On a less virulently angry note: my book on urbanisation and the dead has been explaining how to tell the impact of the "Neolithic Revolution" on the human population via teeth and deaths and man, agriculture was bad for us on almost every front except fertility! Evolution, you fucker.

A couple of notes:

1. interestingly the populations that suffered the least from agricultural adoption were ones involved in "wet rice farming"; Neolithic Thai and Japanese civilisations didn't have the tooth problems than were present at the Dicksons Mound civilisation at the equivalent developmental period or at Aşlıkı Höyük. No word on any South American cultures but it does rather put a hole below the waterline on the ~Tumblrite Morality Inversion~ mentality of New World Civilisations Did Everything Right, Only Evil Europe And Evil Adjacent Areas are wrong at things.*

2. You inherit caries from your mother. As in your oral bacteria are transferred through "prechewed food and maternal affection" as an infant so you end up with your mother's bacterial microbiome, in the same way that vaginal birthed children receive the faecal microbiome of their mothers by uh. being in the poo? I think? IDK because I was a Caesarian back when those were uncommon.

3. It's set me thinking again about how much environment and resources shape the development of cultures and the "speed" at which they reach specific "milestones" in their history. Scare quotes because environment and resources and the culture that develops also dictate what people value, what their purposes are. AS a loose example: woven cloth is not a high priority if you live in a place where it rots off your body in a month. The effort/reward ratio is just not worth it. Writing is held up as another one, but as multiple cultures in Australia have demonstrated, you don't necessarily need writing when you have a continuous intergenerationally-checked oral cultural memory stretching back possibly 40,000 years.

4. In partnership with what I was reading last night while I was tracking down the etymology of "Gunyah": agriculture has been tried most places where people live, independently of external influence. Some places abandoned it, some places did it for only alternate years, some places had more regenerative variants (floating gardens, food forests, etc), and nowhere, not even in Evil Europe Which Does Everything Wrong, did people completely abandon hunting and gathering as a full culture--not even during industrialisation--until the advent of the 20th century.