And I am also unhappy at the direct linkage of stature/robusticity to diet. There was another factor involved with the transition to farming in many parts of the world, namely that people began to live in much larger, denser and permanent concentrations, and they lived in close proximity to their animals. The opportunities for communicable diseases were greatly enhanced, as the opportunity for diseases to cross from animals to humans. Was decreased stature and robusticity in the working class urban populations of the industrial revolution a consequence of poorer diet than farm labourers had enjoyed? Or was it a combination of poor diet and poor living conditions?

At least in Australia, they had trade and communication networks covering long distances. Agreed it’s not the same thing, but they were part of larger social entities of a sort.

A lot of the early European explorers in Australia were kept alive by Aboriginal people when they got themselves into trouble, so they had the culture. Undoubtedly, Aboriginal culture embodies the concept of giving what you can give to people in need, even strangers.

When you can subsist on a wide variety of species, you may be less vulnerable to short term climate fluctuations, particularly if you are below the Malthusian limit in times of abundance. It’s not like they were unfamiliar with the phenomenon of drought, and they had oral histories. Again, it’s not the same thing as a large collective grain store centrally administered, but it gives some dimension of robustness. Presumably for farming communities the taxes went at least partly towards building in this community preparedness. It’s not a totally unreasonable system – it puts some curb on people producing too many children, and makes provision to feed the community in bad times.

Those are not really big points against, but I just mention them for completeness.

I see other factors at play in keeping HGs below the Malthusian limit, though – infanticide, mortality through violence, etc. Aboriginal people practised infanticide and had at least notional birth control practices, because a woman could carry only one child over long distances. Whether it was also from some notion of keeping the group down to a number that won’t overtax the available resources is maybe stretching it, it begins to sound like a just-so story. But for HGs who rely on being highly mobile, it really amounts to the same thing.

But it doesn’t do to generalize. And I get your main point – farming is intuitively a more reliable and predictable way to get a steady supply of food, albeit with much less variety and nutritional value. To an HG who is frequently going hungry and dependent on sources that are frequently unreliable, that would seem valuable. It did, that happened in Australia, Aboriginal people went nuts over biscuits, refined flour, sugar, jam and tea that they could get from whitey in steady predictable supply.

The nut of my argument is that hunter and gatherer peoples have less capacity for storing food than agricultural peoples and thus can be decimated by a much shorter famine, and partly as a result of this, are seldom near the Malthusian limit during the good years.

Of course they do, in abundance. Dried berries, dried fruit, dried tubers and mushrooms, fresh fruit and tubers that last, dried fish, dried and smoked fish and meat, stored animal fat, nuts, and even collected grains – to name a few. Just because they were mobile does not mean they did not have permanent albeit seasonal settlements. Add to that frozen food during cold times / the ice ages.

No they don’t. Ask Greg Laden, who actually knows something about this. The Inuit are atypical in this due to their particular environment. In the general case, HGs are highly mobile to take advantage of seasonal abundance of both plants and animals, and it is the need for mobility of the whole group that is a constraint on both old people and reproduction.

Agricultural people also had seasonal famines and bad years, often multiple bad years in a row. This was an incentive to improve methods and crops. HGs have their own incentives to find ways to encourage both food plants and prey animal abundance, but less scope for innovation.

A factor stunting agricultural peoples: peasants are by definition not mobile, especially once the good land is all in use. For this reason they are at the mercy of a well-organized military force, and imperial tax collectors would tend to keep the peasantry at the bare subsistence level regardless of agricultural productivity or population levels. In kind taxes/rents on peasant farmers could be as high as 50%.

Several controlled experiments have shown, that health parameters can improve on a grain free diet, including dental health. It’s still unknown, how much this is because specifically grains and other factors that changed.

#5, yeah. that’s not impossible. one can also imagine that HG pops had more between group conflict, with smaller groups.

In addition to a more varied diet that was better nutritionally, hunter gatherers were relatively disease free, not just because of nutrition, but for other reasons as elucidated in the post.

Plus you have to think about the fact that evolution has not stopped – think about lactose tolerance and what Razib once referred to as a “hammer blow of selection”.

If people are lactose tolerant, what makes you think they are any longer particularly adapted to a hunter-gatherer diet, or that they would be better off cutting dairy foods out of their diet?

Thanks,
Chris

The modern Western diet doesn’t have the same problems (we don’t rely on a single staple crop, for example, and have figured out how to limit the lethality of most infectious diseases), and indeed, we’ve finally regained the height we had in the paleolithic. We’re sort of in the extreme case of the effect Rahib theorizes existed in 19th century Ireland and other places, we’ve perfected agriculture and “dense living” to the point that most of the problems associated with it no longer exist.

So while there might be reasons to think a paleo-diet is healthier then a modern one, I don’t think this article provides one of those arguments.