I connected the same dots independently, last year...and was somewhat disappointed to find, upon searching for references, that Wadley and Martin had done the same nearly 20 years ago!

I'm sure the reason that their work isn't better known is that it overturns the entire narrative of the origins of civilization and of humans.  If you accept Wadley and Martin, you must also reject the idea that agricultural civilization represents an inevitable and necessary step in human progress...and I think it's safe to say that only a tiny minority are willing to even entertain the concept.

Thank you for contributing: perceptive commenters like yourself are always welcome here!

JS

Fascintating series (and website - first time reader here).

Your last reply to J Stanton triggered a memory I had of a paper that offered an alternate hypothesis on why agriculture *and* civilisation was adopted, so widely, and aggressively - despite its negative health benefits.
Wadley and Martin, in 1993, posited that it could have been because wheat, and milk, are *addictive*.

From their paper (http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/gwadley/msc/WadleyMartinAgriculture.html)

"We have reviewed evidence from several areas of research which shows that cereals and dairy foods have drug-like properties, and shown how these properties may have been the incentive for the initial adoption of agriculture. We suggested further that constant exorphin intake facilitated the behavioural changes and subsequent population growth of civilisation, by increasing people's tolerance of (a) living in crowded sedentary conditions, (b) devoting effort to the benefit of non-kin, and (c) playing a subservient role in a vast hierarchical social structure.

Cereals are still staples, and methods of artificial reward have diversified since that time, including today a wide range of pharmacological and non-pharmacological cultural artifacts whose function, ethologically speaking, is to provide reward without adaptive benefit. It seems reasonable then to suggest that civilisation not only arose out of self-administration of artificial reward, but is maintained in this way among contemporary humans. Hence a step towards resolution of the problem of explaining civilised human behaviour may be to incorporate into ethological models this widespread distortion of behaviour by artificial reward."

Not only are the people who eat wheat addicted to it, but those that govern them (who usually ate less bread and more meat and veg) are addicted to their power over the wheat eating populace.

Of course, the addiction theme was taken up by Dr Davis in Wheat Belly, and many who have gone off wheat, myself included, go through minor withdrawal symptoms.

The myriad ways that food has shaped our evolution and civilisation are fascinating. It is only in the fossil fuel age that food has been knocked off its perch as the most important commodity to control/acquire. But even then, our pursuit of fossil energy follows the same pattern as that of food energy - most reward for least effort, but whatever effort is needed, will be made, ahead of anything else.

It is all very interesting!

I know where he's going...he probably just read "The 10,000 Year Explosion".  

So: what exactly does "agriculturalist genes" mean?  It means that southern Europeans are, genetically, closer to Middle Easterners who took up farming ~10KYA (exception: the Basque) -- and northern Europeans are, genetically, closer to local hunter-gatherers who took up some amount of farming much more recently.

Several subjects to keep in mind:

First, he's talking about the difference between 10 thousand years ago and 3-5 thousand years ago -- compared to ~6 million years of hominin evolution, and 3.4 million years of well-established meat-eating.  The differences are small except in a few narrowly defined categories such as disease resistance, lactase persistence, and a lower frequency of the HLA MHCs associated with celiac.

Then, remember that "anatomically modern humans" first appear between 200 KYA and 100 KYA...in other words, our ancestors were archaeologically indistinguishable from modern humans for 20-40x the span of time in question.

Moving on: natural selection doesn't care if you're happy or optimal: it cares who reproduces more successfully.  1000 sick farmers were, on average, more successful than 50 healthy hunter-gatherers, and generally replaced them by force.  (The archaeological evidence is 100% clear on this point: in every case for which we have evidence, the transition to agriculture was a health catastrophe, resulting in sickness, deformity, and short lifespan.  See Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race.)

So we have been selected in the few thousand years since agriculture for the traits that help us survive to reproductive age, not those that allow us to live a long, healthy life -- which were selected over millions of years.  People grow up and bear children on a diet of Mountain Dew, Taco Bell, and gas station chili dogs...we're very successful in that regard!  But as we know from our own experience, a paleo diet leaves us healthier and happier, even if we're not necessarily more reproductively successful in the short term.

Finally, it's instructive to remember that Stephan has never been paleo.  At best, he's been a Weston A. Price supporter, very positive on the dietary value of grains and beans (soaked and sprouted, of course), a stance with which I disagree.  (See, for instance, my previous article).  Even with that caveat, I haven't found WHS to be an objective source of information since he left school and began supporting the dogma of his employer (e.g. insulin makes you slim).  As a result, I don't read WHS anymore, and I don't recommend reading it to others.

JS

Stephan just had an interesting series on Otzi. he thinks that after 5k-10k year, the agriculturists gene would be favored by natural selection. so much that all Europeans carry

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/04/beyond-otzi-european-evolutionary.html

John Taylor Gatto has a lot to say about the education issue.

And yes, it would be much better and more interesting to discuss multiple interpretations!  For example, using both a standard history text and Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" in parallel.

JS

also this http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/uot-sfe_1032812.php
fire 1 million years ago?

Re: skin color, I think so.  Remember that the population genetics figures and times I cite are only applicable to the case of a mutation arising in one individual.  If there is significant genetic variation within a population in general, selection can occur much more quickly, and the variation won't go extinct due to random chance.

I've heard the same thing about India: modern diseases are rising with the introduction of modern foods.

eddie:

It depends on the reproductive rate of those with paler vs. darker skin.  I can easily see social stratification occurring, especially with the caste system (the rich get lighter, the poor get darker or stay the same)...but in America, the rich reproduce less than the poor.

JS

how long this has been in place would make a difference, but it could explain a shift in pigmentation over the last 50 years as those with paler skin produce children with ever paler skin?

If by "first migration out of Africa" you mean Homo erectus, they didn't contribute a significant proportion of the genome to India.  (The Denisovans seem to have contributed to Pacific Islanders and Australian aboriginals.)

We would expect people to show pigmentation variation based on sun exposure within a "race"...there's a difference in skin color between the average Irishman and the average Italian, though both are "white".

The hut question is interesting: one wonders how much time pre-agricultural humans would have spent in their shelters.  In the case of Bushmen the answer is "not much"...they mostly just sleep in them at night.  I think time spent indoors is mostly a post-industrial thing for anyone but the ruling elite...agricultural labor is still mostly outdoors.

Asclepius:

As the conclusion states, "This topic is far into the realm of speculation."  It's certainly entertaining speculation, though!

One central point is that fire isn't necessary to ground sleeping -- a point reinforced by accounts of the Kalahari Bushmen, who didn't require continual fire to keep lions at bay.  (This is another thorn in the side of Richard Wrangham, who maintains that we needed fire to sleep on the ground.)

Neal:

Kassandra's observations are in line with everything I've seen and heard.  Weston A. Price's "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" was all about the problems resulting from natives adopting Western diets, and all the statistics with which I'm familiar show native populations suffering from diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and heart disease at far greater a rate than the white settlers selling it to them.

Kassandra:

Rome and Egypt would be a lot less boring if they taught the real history instead of the sanitized version, which basically involves memorizing a lot of names and dynasties and laughing at the paintings of people with animal heads.

The fundamental problem with our school system is that it was designed from the start to produce compliant manual laborers, not smart, independent thinkers -- because a nation of compliant laborers was what the ruling class thought we needed back in 1900.  

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." -Woodrow Wilson

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." -William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906

JS

My complaint with history classes - and school in general - is that they spend too much time teaching you WHAT to think and none at all teaching you HOW to think. Deductive reasoning should be one of the first things anyone learns! And after it's been drilled into your head for so many years, Rome and Egypt become BORING.