I do not believe all early farmers were short or unhealthy, each generation continues to produce variety in size and structure from ancient dna

unlike cloning (imagining)…. ancient dna works not by replication over and over, just ever and ever creating human tapestry
Virgina Woolf remarked,
“One can not think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (Cader & Roth, 1991). This is a wonderful little book, my favorite line is by Gilbert Le Coze, “I am human. I eat meat ” (Cader & Roth, 1991).
Reference:
Cader, M., & Roth, D. (1991). EAT THESE WORDS. New York: HarperCollins Publishers lyz

Moreover, hunter gatherers have a variety of diet which gives them all the vitamins from a to z.

We are as unhealthy now as the early farmers . . . . Thanks to the erroneous food pyramid and the carb companies that fool us to eat their cheap cereals, chips, and snacks. Also hotdogs and hamburgers which are chiefly made of carb extenders. And softdrink companies that feed us sugar instead of water when we are thirsty.

Both Chinese and European records indicate healthy height and development for nobles compared to civilian or slave populations. Nobles had luxury to eat like hunter/gatherer ancestors. Nobles basically were hunt/gathers over even larger land since they owned both farmers and lands. Ironically, some hunter/gatherers imposed themself over farmers and became ruling noble class. Their traditional life style of hunting wild animals however lost due to habitat lost to farming. When Hun invaded Europe during Roman time, the ruling hun actually recruited European farmers to settle in Hungary in order to provide them with material wealth. Well, farmers are domesticad animals like catttle.

However, exploited farmers still outnumber hunter/gatherers in the end. People who can survive with very limited resource always have edge. In modern history, only country that did not suffer population decrease in World War 2 was China despite huge number of people had been killed or starved. China population had increased during world war 2. On battle field, kill/death ratio for Chinese army was 1:2. To Japanese army, they seems winning every battle. But at end, Chinese army seems never run out of supply of soldiers. Actually, the army size even increased at end of world war 2. To fight such opponent, you can win every battle but still lose the war at end mathematically.

The same can be said during early struggle between farmers and hunter/gathers. Hunters might be good fighters to win every battle. But farmers had unlimited supply of troops.

I wonder whether the nobles among the agricultural societies were similarly unhealthy?

http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras-Seed-Unforeseen-Cost-Civilization/dp/1400062152

It explained why roaches out survive dinosaurs.

The diff is that this culture was run by women who used herbal birth control so there was always the resources needed to raise every child. Make no mistake; dozens of herbs evolved to cause sterility or abortion to prevent herbivores from developing a taste for them. I have, for example, both sweet potato and wild yam in my garden. Both have the same hearth shaped leaves on vines, but the deer will eat the former right to the ground and not touch the latter just couple yards away.

Wild yam has phyto-estrogen, the active ingredient in RU-486 and the pill. Part of the problem is the history we have was written by scribes in the pay of warrior elites, so these are the cultures that get looked it, and yes, slaves are not fed well.

I can’t see early humans giving up foraging and gathering as this article implies, just because they had a field of wheat or barley and some cows. Early farmers had to have had a good reason to give up all the nutritional benefit derived from continued hunting and gathering. This article does not go into any of those reasons.

One hypothesis has to do with the Pleistocene mass extinction (whether triggered by over hunting or not). Early humans gave up hunting and gathering in favor of agriculture not because the latter was superior to the forming, but because, thanks to the dying out of much of their preferred prey and significant diminishment in the numbers and diversity of what remained, hunting and gathering didn’t work anymore. Agriculture was their desperate last ditch solution that kept them alive, if worse off than before.

It probably happened in stages, over many generations. Hunter-gatherers figured out early on that they could manipulate their environment in certain ways to increase their hunting and gathering yields. This would have evolved over time into the earliest forms of proto-agriculture (it could have begun with something as simple as noticing that a relative abundance of edible plants grew “spontaneously” near their communal latrines). A mixed system would have arisen where people obtained some of their nutrition from hunting and gathering, and some from local small-scale agricultural production. But as it became harder and harder to hunt and gather, more and more food was provided by agriculture and more and more effort devoted to it, until hunting and gathering was abandoned entirely. Once they committed to agriculture on a large scale, this resulting in agriculture-supporting environmental manipulation that made any return to hunting and gathering impractical.