David Bainbridge’s book on middle age is a good read, even though he is, for my taste, a bit too keen on the Just-So explanations of evolutionary psychology.
Last Wednesday’s Frontiers in Radio 4 took us to an Egyptian backyard in the company of a scientist who, in full protective gear, took swabs from the front & back ends of a duck in search of the bird flu virus. That clip reminded me of one of the more intriguing speculations reported in Bainbridge’s book – that settled agriculture may not have been the unalloyed Good Thing which we have been conventionally taught to believe. There may have been a high price to pay for this necessary step in man’s progress towards knowledge & civilisation – namely a drastic reduction in longevity.
We might have found a way to live with, rather than kill or run away from animals – or perhaps they found us, we never persuaded tigers & lions to accept the deal – but that made us vulnerable to their germs & effluents.
Ploughing too may have added to the dangers, by liberating long-buried toxins from the soil. And if Nature made our crops fail we struggled to survive the year.
Doubtless there were prehistoric ancestors of the Soil Association, a Hunting Brotherhood who warned about the error of Man’s foolhardy attachment to settling down.
Links
Related posts
