History Cookbook

In the 20th century, scholars studying the lives of modern hunter-gatherers began to realize that their lifestyle and diet were better for them than that of more settled cultures.

The skeletons of ancient hunter-gatherers are surprisingly large and robust. Overall they show few signs of degenerative diseases and tooth decay.

This, they say, includes murder, warfare and cannibalism. This is hotly disputed and other anthropologists believe such claims are based on scant evidence; they think the lack of widespread evidence indicates just the opposite.

As people settled into farming communities, the potential for warfare increased as communities, tied to one location, could be threatened by enemies more effectively.

The fear of wild animals is a feeling only vaguely known to modern westerners, for example, when on safari and told not, on any account, to get out of the jeep. This fear could account for the myths in many societies, which praise great hunters.

There would have been a fear amongst early hunter-gatherer and farming societies of their environment and the spirits and magic that inhabited it. Health would be seen as influenced by an ever-present and often malevolent (evil) spirit world. In this world, magic was a basic tool for survival. Really powerful magic may have even demanded human sacrifice.

Knowledge would have built up through trial and error and been passed orally down the generations. The plants would have been gathered and given to the sick by medicine men or by the women of the community (the traditional carers).

Some of the holes had partially healed over, showing the person lived on after the event and it was not intended to kill them. This practice may have been used to treat conditions such as acute headaches or epilepsy.

Even simple cuts and breakages of bone, without proper facilities to treat them, may have become seriously infected, sometimes causing death.

The clay would then set hard so that the bone could heal properly without interference.

Farming also involved harder work, for longer hours, which would have caused other health problems.

For example, pigs and ducks have passed on the flu and, from dogs, people first got the measles.

There was no efficient way to get rid of their waste and the water was often polluted. Fire was another risk. All big cities have experienced major conflagrations in their histories, killing many of their inhabitants.

The main method was to fix the time of marriage. If land is short, marriage tends to be later – allowing fewer children to be born. If land is abundant, marriage has been earlier, encouraging larger families.

Sometimes violence involved the wholesale massacring of one people by another. Migration (which often also involved warfare and massacres) was another tactic, as was infanticide (the killing of young children) and the adoption of more intensive farming techniques, often involving great ingenuity.

This happened because bits of stone from the grain grinders became embedded in the bread. As people ate the bread, the stone granules wore away at their teeth.

The bodies of ancient people would have needed time to adjust to such a change in eating habits.

The range of jobs included looking after herds of animals, milking, making fences and hedges, ploughing, harvesting and cutting wood. These tasks all had to be done at particular times of the year, and in all kinds of weather. Rheumatism was a common ailment, as was backache.

Men lived longer than women. Many bones of women have been found buried with those of babies, suggesting that childbirth may have accounted for this difference. Alternatively, women may only have had access to poorer food and, therefore, had less resistance to disease.