Because of a growing population that was increasingly urban, as well as the growth in trade between early Neolithic cities, the need to oversee complex public works projects drove the development of ever more complex forms of government. The resulting growth of material wealth—surpluses of food and expansion in the amount of real estate that could be controlled by one family—showed that some members of society were inevitably better than others at tasks that mattered to the society. In other words, if you had a particular set of skills that were highly valued, you had a higher social status, which increasingly came to be reflected by the material rewards you accumulated.
The shift to wealthy urban settlements with goods to trade made the population more vulnerable to attacks from outsiders. After all, if you see a neighboring city becoming richer than your own, what’s to stop you from attacking it and simply taking what its people have toiled so hard to accumulate? This would have led to the development of a formal military, rather than a citizen militia. There was suddenly something worth dying for. Because of its importance in defending the city from attack—and perhaps also, in aggressive cultures, its ability to go out and acquire new resources by attacking other settlements—the military would have played an important role in the society. And as with all skills, prowess in battle and military acumen would have been unevenly distributed. Since men are physically more suited to the intense physical activity of battle, they would have gained higher social status. The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has argued that men are naturally inclined to be better mechanical inventors than women (just as women, with their arguably better abilities to read subtle social cues, are probably better natural traders, at least judging from the preponderance of women in markets in the developing world), and technology was crucial in the Neolithic arms race. Either way, the new, warlike environment that came into existence during the Neolithic Revolution created an environment that was tailor-made for men to usurp the power of the goddess cults, or at least the equal status of women.
Although performing a seemingly trivial act, the first person to plant a seed set all of this in motion by tying our fortunes to those of the planted fields. Food became a fuel—a sort of primitive biodiesel, if you will—for powering social change. This was our first encounter with something I’ll explore more fully later in this book—something I call transgenerational power. It is the idea that, with the increase in our power over the world around us brought about through the development of agriculture, we gained the power to affect events many generations down the line. Our minds, having evolved over millions of years during which we were hunter-gatherers, our only concerns about cause and effect extending perhaps a season into the future (will moving there make it harder to find game or gather plants in the dry season?), were not equipped to imagine the sequence of events that might occur long after we were gone. And given that as hunter-gatherers we were very much a part of the environment in which we lived, rather than in control of it, we didn’t need to worry about how things might play out many years down the road. Our actions, like those of any other animal in the ecosystem we lived in, didn’t have a large enough effect to perturb the “balance of nature.” The development of agriculture changed all of this.
The events of history, now that we have entered the realm of the written record, are well chronicled, and there is no need to reiterate them in detail here. The first writing developed in Mesopotamia for recording transactions between traders, but it soon allowed people a measure of immortality by giving them a way to note details about themselves that would live on for posterity. The Palette of Narmer, an inscribed stone tablet dating from 3200 B.C., is the earliest known example of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Recording the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt by the pharaoh Narmer, it is perhaps the earliest description of a real-life historical figure. It is displayed prominently in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and every year two and a half million people have a chance to read about this person who lived over 5,000 years ago. Narmer must have been hoping for this kind of temporal influence when he commissioned the tablet, and it is a clear sign of how far humans had come in the few millennia since agriculture was developed. Villages had coalesced into cities, which had been joined together into empires with written records of their deeds to pass down to future generations. What before may have been lost to posterity or decayed into vague myth was now written in stone, an immutable statement about the person and the society he lived in.
Between 3000 B.C. and the Middle Ages, human society continued to grow and evolve along this same path, with ever more complex technology—bronze, then iron; mounted cavalry; powerful compound bows that greatly extended an archer’s range—and larger empires: Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome to the west, the Han and Khmer Empires in the East, the Mauryans in India, Great Zimbabwe in Africa. Religion became more formalized, with monotheism replacing polytheism among the majority of the world’s population. Two of the world’s great monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, with their great zeal for conversion, spread over wide territories to dominate the world. Their adherents soon numbered in the tens of millions—a far cry from the localized ancestor cults of the early Neolithic. But all of these events unfolded with a certain predictability, a natural outcome of what had been set in motion by the Neolithic Revolution.
Then, rather suddenly, another revolution happened. It had its roots in the growing importance of trade in the fortunes of states, which was replacing agriculture, religion, and rigid social stratification as the dominant sources of power. Whereas in the past people had often believed that they were preordained to live a particular type of life by God or king, by the eighteenth century it was becoming clear that this system was not necessarily producing an optimal outcome for the majority of the population. The Enlightenment works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume, and others questioned the status quo in a way no one ever had before, asking deep philosophical questions about the innate rights of human beings to life, liberty, and property. In Britain, in particular, the merchant class chafed at the limitations of life in a class-based society that still valued land over industry, despite the ever-increasing importance of the latter.
The speed at which the Industrial Revolution played out was a testimony to how interconnected the world had become by the nineteenth century. While it had taken nearly 10,000 years, ending with the European colonial era, to bring the seeds of agriculture to every last corner of the globe, it would take only a few generations to distribute the factories of the Industrial Revolution. This is because the rate at which information was conveyed had increased exponentially since the days of Abu Hureyra and Çatalhöyük. It is possible that at the dawn of the Neolithic, so localized were the lives of each village that each would have spoken its own language or dialect. The consolidation of empires in the Bronze and Iron Ages would have enforced a dominant language on the groups that were conquered, thus facilitating the spread of information (and, therefore, making the empire governable). This common language would also have led to a much faster spread of innovations from one place to another, which would have increased the rate at which innovation occurred. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the majority of the world’s population spoke, at least as a second language, one of three European languages: English, French, or Spanish. This was the environment that allowed the Industrial Revolution and its ideas to spread like wildfire.
Inevitably, the Industrial Revolution and its reliance on the rapid transmission of ideas led to the modern era, where access to information is the key to power and wealth. Of the world’s population of 6.8 billion, it is estimated that 25 percent, or 1.7 billion people, use the Internet; this is more than the total number of people on the planet in 1900. In North America, nearly three-quarters of the population uses it regularly. It’s not surprising, then, that we are currently experiencing a period of innovation that makes even the Industrial Revolution pale in comparison. Ideas fly from Boston to Bangalore to Brisbane in milliseconds, carried through pipes that dri
p only 0’s and 1’s from their spigots. It should be the best of times, with ever-increasing life spans and ever-richer people. But it isn’t. As the quote by Richard Tomkins that opens this book suggests, life today is far from perfect, and many people feel that things are getting worse. In the next chapters I’ll examine some of the problems we have come to face during this ten-millennium period of revolutionary change, and will show how they ultimately trace back to a mismatch between the culture we set in motion 10,000 years ago by planting that first seed and ourselves as human beings.
Chapter Three
Diseased
Infectious disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, as it has been hitherto, one of the fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.
—WILLIAM MCNEILL,
Plagues and Peoples
Overeating and inactivity are the proximal causes of obesity, but unfettered consumerism drives the obesity pandemic of the twenty-first century.
—ELLEN RUPPEL SHELL,
The Hungry Gene
DOLLYWOOD
The Great Smoky Mountains sit toward the southern end of the Appalachian Range, which runs nearly the entire length of the eastern coast of the United States, from Labrador to northern Alabama. Thrust upward around 450 million years ago by the collision of continental plates during the creation of the supercontinent of Pangaea, the Appalachians were at one time part of the same range as the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. With the highest peaks in the entire chain, the Smokies have long been a magnet for outdoor enthusiasts from the surrounding states. Hiking through the lush spruce forests interspersed with native rhododendrons, or skiing down the only slopes in the southeastern United States with reliable natural snow, the large number of visitors make these mountains a hub of activity.
In the past fifty years the towns of Gatlinburg and nearby Pigeon Forge, the main settlements on the Tennessee side of the park, have benefited from an ever-increasing flow of tourists, which topped 9.4 million in 2006, making Great Smoky Mountains National Park the most visited in the country. Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg have recently eclipsed the park, though, and attracted more than 11 million tourists that same year. While Gatlinburg has to a certain extent maintained its 1950s small-town feel, Pigeon Forge has seen nearly unchecked growth. It is now a sprawling, traffic-clogged tourist destination, one of the largest in the southern United States. Although it has outlet malls, go-kart racing, and other typical “destination” attractions, its number one tourist draw is Dollywood, an amusement park co-owned by Dolly Parton, the buxom country-and-western singer, which attracts over 2 million visitors every year.
I visited Dollywood on a hot, sunny day in late June, near the peak of the summer tourist season. In between taking my children on roller coasters and waiting in line for ice cream, I had a chance to observe the surroundings—the human surroundings, to be precise. What struck me most was the noticeably high level of obesity; many people were not just overweight but clinically obese—that is, they had a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or greater, which is equivalent to being five foot nine and weighing more than 205 pounds. Having lived on the East and West Coasts of the United States and in Europe for the past two decades, I wasn’t used to seeing so many large people. The rides with fitted seats and passenger-retention devices had “sample seats” near their entrances so people could see if they would fit into the ride—and many didn’t. While the corn dogs and funnel cakes certainly didn’t help keep waistlines svelte, this plethora of paunch was clearly part of a deeper and more long-standing problem.
Although people come from all over the country to visit Dollywood, it primarily draws visitors from nearby states—Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and other parts of the South and the Midwest. According to recent data on the patterns of obesity in the United States published by the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH), these are among the fattest states in the country. In Mississippi, for instance, nearly a third of the adult population is clinically obese, making it the heaviest state in America, and West Virginia and Louisiana are close behind. When the fifteen fattest states are mapped, a striking pattern emerges.
FIGURE 13: THE FIFTEEN U.S. STATES WITH THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF OBESITY.
The clustering of obesity in the South and the Midwest is striking, and not at all what would be expected to occur by chance. There are certainly genetic factors involved in obesity, but genetics fails to explain both this geographic clustering and the increasing rate of obesity over the past two decades—in 1991, no state exceeded an obesity rate of 20 percent. Our genes haven’t changed that much in less than a generation. Clearly, another explanation is needed.
The answer likely lies in the relative socioeconomic status of the people living in these states. Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia are the poorest states in the country, with per capita incomes around half of that in the richest state, Connecticut. South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Kentucky are also in the bottom eleven states. The poorest states also trail in the rankings of educational attainment, with around 20 percent of the population not completing high school. This is certainly part of a vicious cycle: high school dropouts tend to have significantly lower incomes than people who complete high school or college, and poorer children are less likely to complete high school. But why does being poor and uneducated put you at higher risk for becoming obese? It seems that, if anything, poorer people should be less able to afford enough food to make them fat.
By now probably everyone in the world has heard about the problem of obesity, so it shouldn’t come as news that there are a lot of fat people out there. Films and books like Super Size Me have brought this problem to the public in a very visible way, and according to the same TFAH survey, 85 percent of Americans now consider obesity to be an epidemic. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, obesity is now the second most important root cause of illness and mortality, after cigarette smoking, and may overtake smoking in the next ten years, as more and more people around the world become overweight. Our food, meant to nourish us, is now killing us.
If obesity is an epidemic, though, it is clearly affecting some people more than others. The international trend mirrors the one in the United States, with richer countries tending to have lower obesity rates. In Europe, for instance, there is a weak but noticeable trend for countries with lower average levels of education and per capita gross domestic product to have higher levels of obesity; levels are typically higher in countries of the former Eastern bloc and those in the eastern Mediterranean, such as Greece and Cyprus. The pattern is not as clear as it is in the United States, but it is suggestive.
FIGURE 14: THE INVERSE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OBESITY AND HOUSEHOLD INCOME IN THE UNITED STATES.
Several reasons have been posited for this odd correlation, ranging from lack of understanding of the relationship between obesity and disease among the less educated to lack of access to healthful food. It is true that wealthier people in the developed world are more likely to eat fresh, nutritious foods, and in the past few years there has been a strong movement in some upper-middle-class circles for a return to locally grown, organic ingredients. Many people are not aware of, or ignore, the dangers associated with the increasing proportion of highly processed, sugar-laden “fast food” so readily available in the developed world, as Eric Schlosser has pointed out in his fascinating and frightening book Fast Food Nation. Couple this with a lack of physical activity as more and more people leave manual jobs in factories and farms for service-sector jobs with long commuting times, and it is a recipe for disaster.
While the poorest in the developing world remain relatively thin due to actual food shortages and the high levels of everyday physical activity necessary for mere survival, as they become richer, some members of even the world’s poorest countries fall prey to the adiposity trap. It seems that the key to producin
g an obesity epidemic is for a society to have just enough money and education to give it access to an excess of processed food and an inactive lifestyle, but not enough for it to realize that overeating and not exercising is dangerous. This “danger zone” of development, as it spreads into the developing world, is expected to increase the global burden of obesity enormously in the coming decades. As more people in their countries enter the ranks of the global middle class, Indian and Chinese government officials have become increasingly concerned about their rising obesity rates, which have doubled in the past decade, largely in the wealthier urban populations.
The world’s policy makers and public health experts recognize the problem, but dealing with it is another matter. Diabetes, one of the serious chronic diseases stemming from obesity, is now a common fact of life in places where a generation ago people were still starving. It is “the price you pay for progress,” according to the director of a hospital in Chennai, India, who specializes in the ailment. His resignation stems from the difficulty of getting people to change their lifestyles. Fattening food and inactivity are powerful drugs, it seems, and appeal to something deep in our nature, as though we were genetically programmed to fall under their spell. Which, in many ways, we are.
THRIFTY GENOTYPES AND PROFLIGATE TASTES
James Neel was an American physician and geneticist who spent much of his career working with the Yanomami Indians of the Brazilian Amazon. He had started out studying evolution in fruit flies, but he decided to go to medical school soon after joining the Dartmouth faculty, in 1939, and ended up specializing in human genetics. After spending the years after the Second World War studying the genetic effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs (surprisingly, he found that there was no increase in the mutation rate among those exposed to the radiation from the bombs), he decided to combine his early interests by applying genetic methods to the field of anthropology.
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