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1The Neolithic transition has always been the subject of very contrasting judgments. For some, this socio-economic transformation is part of a trajectory of progress, as it was conceived in the 19th century: the permanent house with ever-improving comfort, the village seen as a federation of families in solidarity, the territory exploited by agriculture and livestock, a nearby space with infinitely multiplying resources, food security and the possibility of feeding a greater number of mouths. So many gains underpinned by ever more sophisticated technical advances: the well, waterbending, the tools for deforestation and for tilling the land, the field and the meadow, the flail and the tribulum, mining, the harnessing of animals, the yoke and the plough, wheeled vehicles, accounting and sealing, etc.

2Others question the reality of these “benefits”, especially when they are considered in a long historical perspective. The Neolithic is then perceived as a distancing from nature, the spiral of growth, the first damage to the environment (and sometimes as the matrix of the “Anthropocene”), the artificialization of the plant and animal environment, the damage to biodiversity, a form of linguistic trivialization and the disappearance of certain indigenous languages, the appearance of social inequalities and even wars, the seeds of tendencies towards the domination of the masses, the explosion of diseases which had been latent until then but which were suddenly released by human and animal promiscuity, etc. So many drifts that we can globally put on the back of this transition without questioning too much the factors of these disturbances: the politico-economic choices of Man himself. And these “pessimists” regret the previous “affluent society”, this supposed Paleolithic “golden age” whose advantages some anthropologists have praised.

3But was the Neolithic primarily beneficial to the health and well-being of individuals? This question is rarely asked. This is why Françoise Le Mort and Anne-MarieÊTillier have wisely launched a food and health survey to judge in what way this change in lifestyle would have had beneficial effects on the subjects who, over the generations, lived through this crucial turning point in evolution. They have taken as their geographical framework the Near East and its margins, that is to say the oldest focus of the planet in which the transformation from hunters to farmers has taken place. In time, their investigation has been conducted over a long period of time, the best possible approach insofar as Neolithization, far from being a rapid process, was in fact stretched over several millennia from the first Natufian attempts at sedentarization to the fully agro-pastoral communities having, beyond the long pre-ceramic phases, definitively integrated pottery into their domestic equipment. Sometimes, the investigation even begins very early, in the heart of the Paleolithic millennia, another way of verifying if sanitary gains are really to be credited to agricultural life.

4From this meticulous expertise, the results may leave one doubtful about the benefits of the transition. It is not a question of making an ideological choice between two socio-economic models, but of critically measuring the health status of populations at various moments in human history, without preconceived ideas; the reader is free to make up his or her own mind afterwards.

5Let us review the contents of the dossier. Let us first take a chronological reference point far upstream, that of Qafzeh (Lower Galilee), a site where A.-M.ÊTillier analyzed the series of 28Êsubjects, which can give a “photograph” of an anatomically modern population, around 100,000 BC, i.e., at its early stage. The assessment of this sample of nomadic hunter-gatherers highlights growth anomalies, various oral and bone pathologies, traumatic lesions attributable to the living conditions, and caries already very present enabling the author to wonder if all these physical inconveniences would not be partly due to a certain endogamic drift.

6From a sample of 558ÊLevantine individuals from 24Êsites and spread over a long period of time (13,000/6,000 BC), A.ÊStutz, F.ÊBocquentin, B.ÊChamel and M.ÊAnton have found that biological stresses recorded from early childhood had deleterious consequences leading to early mortality in childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. These authors thus reach the conclusion of a deterioration of the “average well-being” from the moment when the agricultural communities were strengthened, all leading to a negative impact during the terminal phases of the process (PPNC and beginning of the PN, in the 7th and 6th millennia BC), a finding that seems to be confirmed in the poor health of the Anatolians of Çatalhöyük. The Neolithic transition, in all its interactive complexity, shows a statistical trend towards an increase in mortality and fertility, implying the need to better determine the interrelationships between fertility, mortality, cultural conditions and migratory processes.

7The changes induced by the stabilization of the habitat, the life in more or less important communities, the economic and social transformations, the supposed demographic stresses, the modifications of the diet: so many factors with biological consequences. The assessment that I.ÊHershvovitz, R.ÊSarig and H.ÊMay have drawn up for the Southern Levant, based on a broad comparative survey ranging from the Natufian hunters to the Chalcolithic, and even beyond (the Roman-Byzantine and Ottoman periods), is not at all pleasing. If the Neolithics seem to be less vulnerable to ear infections than the Natufians and the Chalcolithics, on the other hand, from a more general point of view, the new living conditions are accompanied by a certain sanitary deterioration: skeletons and mandibles reduce in size and robustness during the Holocene, dental diseases, bone fractures, lumbago, obesity and other problems such as infectious diseases are on the increase. To this observation, the authors add a loss of life expectancy in women...

8Specifically, the examination of dental pathologies proves to be a good indicator for assessing the effects of diet in farming communities. From seven Syrian sites of the Neolithic sequence (PPNA, PPNB, Pottery Neolithic) proposing a corpus of 4,307Êteeth attributable to 312Êindividuals, B.ÊChamel analyzes how mastication can generate caries, abscesses, tooth loss and periodontal diseases. She observed that these various affections are not interdependent and do not systematically increase with time. A peak of lesions, corresponding to the Middle-Late PPNB (8thÊmillennium) could be due to the definitive establishment of the agro-pastoral economy, embryonic until then, and to the henceforth uniform morphology of the cereals consumed. Subsequently, the use of ceramics in cooking food may have favored the adherence of residues to the teeth, a situation favorable to the development of bacteria.

9Another scourge: tuberculosis, whose time of appearance in humans is the subject of debate. When the Neolithic is now well established in the Near East, during the eighth and seventh millennia, the presence of the disease is certain, as shown by various cases recognized from settlements in Syria, Israel and Jordan, but evidence concerning the ninth millennium are very rare. However, studying here an immature subject from Tell Aswad, who died around 2-3Êyears old, J.ÊOussama Baker, B.ÊChamel and O.ÊDutour highlight a new probable case of tuberculosis in the ninth millennium (early PPNB), i.e. in the heart of the centuries during which the very processes of neolithization and domestication took place.

10On a similar theme, F.ÊLe Mort and H.ÊDuday evoke the case of an adult man from the Khirokitia aceramic culture (Cyprus: 7thÊmillennium), suffering from diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH), bony outgrowths leading to the fusion of vertebrae, associated with vertebral arthrosis. Considering that DISH may be linked to an overly rich diet, the authors question the possible high status of the individual, which raises the question of possible social differences within the Khirokitia population, whereas divergences in diet have not been observed to date.

11Teeth are definitely very much in demand in this dossier because they obviously carry precious information. The hunter-gatherers used them a lot during their various daily activities. During the Anatolian Neolithic period, people continued to “work with their teeth” but such practices became less common. However, a divergence seems to operate from then on according to the gender and the craft works exerted. Y.ÊSelim Erdal thus analyzed 8,800Êpermanent teeth belonging to 682Êindividuals distributed chronologically from the end of the Epipaleolithic (around 10,000 BC) to the end of the Early Bronze Age (around 2,200 BC). Still widely attested in the PPNA, a transitional phase, abrasions decrease significantly from the PPNB onwards, but essentially among men. On the other hand, certain artisanal activities related to female work, and in particular everything related to the manufacture of products from plant and animal fibers (fabrics, baskets, threads, ropes), contributed to the maintenance of wear processes in the teeth of wives.

12E. Herrscher and her colleagues have, for their part, focused their attention on an Early Bronze culture of the Caucasian sphere, the Kura-Araxes (3,500-2,500 BC), admittedly on the margins of the Levantine area, but whose expansion movements towards Anatolia, Iran and the Levant were able to introduce external elements, both genetic and cultural, into these areas peripheral to its hearth. The authors have noted, within this entity, a strong dietary homogeneity, essentially based on the consumption of barley and meat of herbivores, a tradition that has changed little over time. From these codified practices, they deduce a maintained policy of robust social coherence, thus not excluding any individual from the norm based on family ties and kinship structures. Food and culinary practices seem to have been powerful cultural and identity markers.

13Summing up some of the main points of this collection of studies on the Neolithic transition, the findings do not lead to euphoria: biological stresses in early childhood leading to early death, progression of fractures, infectious diseases, dental lesions increasing with the consumption of cereals and then the use of cooking in pots, tuberculosis attested to as early as the Early PPNB, work with fibers entrusted to women and exposing them to deterioration of their dentition. If we add to this balance sheet a decrease in their life expectancy, we can see that women paid a certain tribute to the “agricultural revolution”.

14All this hardly gives a positive image of the Neolithic period in terms of health. Let us draw a lucid conclusion: the permanent search for better living conditions inevitably results in the emergence of pathologies that were previously ignored or remained latent. Our species must therefore integrate that it will always suffer from diseases attributable to its physical and techno-cultural environment. The eradications due to the progress of an efficient medicine could constitute a never-ending quest, one disease chasing the other. Thus yesterday tuberculosis, today cancers and Covid.

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Jean Guilaine, « Food, health, well-being:let’s not idealize the Neolithic! »Paléorient, 47-1 | 2021, 19-22.

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Jean Guilaine, « Food, health, well-being:let’s not idealize the Neolithic! »Paléorient [En ligne], 47-1 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2021, consulté le 15 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/paleorient/872 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/paleorient.872

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