The Impact Of Domestication On Human Health

After reading the two articles by Mark N. Cohen, domestications impact on human health is one of a surprising conclusion. I figured that civilization would lead to a more educated and responsible community on the subject of their health, but I was surprised to find that domestication lead to the corruption of health through malnutrition and the advancement of disease. Throughout this paper you will be given obvious examples of why Cohen made the statement, “Civilization has not been as successful in guaranteeing human well-being as we like to believe.” I will start off with discussing the major health problems facing hunter-gatherers and from there on you can see why Cohen made the statement he did.

The major health problems facing hunter-gatherers was starvation and disease. The problems however, were not as serious as one might assume. You would form a hypothesis that a population with no advanced medicine or agricultural system would be a population in despair. This was not the case what so ever. The diets of hunter-gatherers appeared to be comparatively well balanced, even when they are lean. Contemporary hunter-gatherers enjoyed levels of caloric intake that compare

The major advantage large civilized societies had over smaller human societies in coping with epidemic disease, appears to be precisely that it ultimately permitted epidemic diseases to become both cosmopolitan and endemic in most world regions. This transformation means that exposed populations had a history of recent prior exposure. Such prior exposure may have resulted in populations genetically selected for resistance to these diseases, although specific evidence of such evolved immunity is controversial and hard to pinpoint. More clearly, prior exposure has meant that in each community at least some portion of the adult population is likely to have been infected already (Cohen 137). Civilizations have therefore come to enjoy an advantage in dealing with infectious disease that results paradoxically because their social organization is so permissive of disease transmission; this has proved to be a major political advantage that civilizations have not been loathe to exploit in displacing and decimating their less civilized competitors (Cohen 138).

The impact of domestication on human health is one that from studying archeological sites and from ethnographic accounts we can’t be exactly sure about what really went on, but we can form a pretty good proposal. In this paper I gave examples from the articles written by Mark N. Cohen on why “Civilization has not been as successful in guaranteeing human well-being as we like to believe.” I personally found his and others conclusions quite fascinating.

With this stable diet it helped them in their fight against disease. Cohen states that in an earlier chapter data suggests that hunting and gathering populations would have been visite

Some topics in this essay:
Third World, Mark Cohen, life expectancy, Human Health, human health, adult life expectancy, hunting gathering, adult life, prior exposure, major health, major health facing, human well-being, adoption sedentism farming, “civilization successful guaranteeing, ethnographic accounts, well-being believe”, guaranteeing human, acceleration population growth,