However ‘civilised’ we may now consider ourselves to be, biologically we remain much as we were before we began farming and moved into cities.
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Put simply, urbanisation – which began with the advent of farming – is bad for us. Studies of skeletal remains in cemetery sites show that when the Romans introduced town life to Britain 2,000 years ago, they also introduced us to scurvy, rickets, osteomalacia, Reiter’s syndrome, gout, ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, septic arthritis, tuberculosis, osteitis, poliomyelitis and leprosy. And today, the most common causes of death in half of our urban populations are obesity, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure and various cancers. It is a sobering thought that all these conditionsare rare or non-existent innon-urban societies, such as the tribal communities in Kitava, Papua New Guinea.
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