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Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past through Bioarchaeology

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Next time your bones creak, count your lucky stars. Your ancestors whoever they were, had it worse.
And people like Clark Larsen, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, now have techniques that can measure almost exactly how much worse.
Most of Larsen's work recounted in "Skeletons in Our Closet" was done in the Great Basin (Nevada, Utah and vicinity), where the living was never easy.
By measuring the rotundity of long bones, a bioarchaeologist can determine how much walking a person did, and the hunters and gathers in Nevada 10,000 years ago did some hard travelin'.
This is not surprising. But other essays can reveal less obvious information.
One of the most powerful tools is called stable isotope analysis. If we know what sorts of foods were available where the owner of a bone lived, Larsen can tell, broadly, what kinds he ate.
This is because different kinds of plants use carbon differently. Because they do, the relative presence of heavier or lighter forms of carbon (or other elements) can reveal whether, for example, a person ate a diet of mainly corn.
One surprising finding, made from digs in the eastern part of North America, is that corn did not become important in the diet there until relatively late.
When it did, according to Larsen, the people's health declined.
"The shift from foraging to farming occasioned a reduction in nutrition" in most places, according to Larsen and all other students of early human nutrition known to me.
I believe they are wrong. Hunter-gatherers usually ate a more varied diet than farmers did, and in many ways this variety produced a better balance in nutrition.
Signs of anemia (which show up in porous skulls) are more common among farmers.
The conclusion that farmers were more poorly fed does not follow, however.
Throughout history, and in poorer places today, the chief deficiency in human diet has not been protein or vitamins or mineral but calories. Lack of calories kept hunter-gatherer populations small. Larsen's own work demonstrates the lack of calories, even if he misses the significance.
The flood of calories provided by agriculture allowed many more people to survive. The worse fed of these farmers had more kinds of nutritional deficiencies than hunters did, but they were alive.
In the hunting environment, these people would never have been born at all. So the proper comparison between ill-fed farmers is not with well-fed hunters but with unfed hunters.
This comparison cannot be made through bioarchaeology.
Much of the rest of "Skeletons" is more persuasive. Larsen debunks the notion that the natives of the New World were disease-free before the coming of the Europeans.
"To be sure," he writes, "some of the dreadful Old World diseases (e.g., smallpox, measles and malaria) were absent from the Americas prior to European contact. However, the presence of both nonspecific and specific infections, iron deficiency anemia and other evidence of morbidity throughout the Americas provides substantial evidence contradicting the perception that native peoples were disease-free prior to European contact."
Elsewhere, he proves that just about everybody anyplace got arthritis early. Physical activity was so strenuous that bones and gristle wore out.
Though Larsen has not done bioarchaeology in Polynesia and has nothing to say about the Hawaii version of the "no disease" myth, he does explode one other myth that is held universally here: that the Native Hawaiians lacked a natural immunity to disease that Europeans had.
"I think this consensus is wrong," Larsen writes, referring to the North American version of the same myth, "however, in that it is unlikely that the native populations lacked some inherent genetic resistance in comparison with Europeans. Rather, Europeans had the advantage of having had previous experience with pathogens that caused such diseases as smallpox and measles, resulting in acquired immunities for them."
Some advantage. Measles killed about the same proportion of people in England in the 18th century as it did in Hawaii.
The apparent discrepancy in death rates, argued vehemently by academics like David Stannard of the University of Hawaii and accepted unquestioningly in even the least pretentious guidebooks, never existed.