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How Did The Neolithic Revolution Affect The Human Body

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The Neolithic Revolution occurred about 12,000 years ago and is arguably the biggest event in humankind. It lead to the formation of larger communities that abandoned their hunter-gatherer lifestyles for a more sedentary and agricultural life. Plants were cultivated, meat was cooked, and humans began settling in large groups. This change in lifestyle created an alteration in diet and a decrease in activity level. These factors ultimately affected physical features on the human body. Despite popular belief that the adoption of agriculture improved human life because of the growth in population, it actually created several biological changes in the human body which lead to an overall decline in health due to various skeletal and dental pathologies and an increased spread of disease among the community. One of the first regions of the world to have agriculture was Southwest Asia (Flannery 1973). According to archaeological findings, several regions in Asia seemed to have some form of a village lifestyle before agriculture even began (Flannery 1973). When people began settling in villages instead of constantly shifting from place to place, the population size of groups increased. An …show more content…

This is because the plants that were domesticated contained large amounts of carbohydrates and exposure to excess carbohydrates can lead to dental caries and other oral complications (Larsen 2006). Other mouth problems arised from the decreasing of robusticity in the facial features of humans (Larsen 1995). With the process of cooking meat becoming popular, foods generally became softer and easier to chew, which lead to humans having more gracile facial features (Larsen 1995). Although having more gracile features does not directly affect a person’s health, it does make a person susceptible to have dental problems, such as tooth crowding and malocclusion (Larsen

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