Lecture 2: What Early Agriculturalists Ate
and cooking for the elite. This is the fi rst time that there was
anything like a professional chef. At this point, the population really explodes. A more steady, even
if less nutritious, diet means less amenorrhea for women of child-
bearing age and more babies surviving infancy. In addition, there’s
great incentive to have larger families because that means more
hands to grow food. Large populations with lots of cool stuff to steal leads to war,
which involves much bigger engagements, rather than small-time
raids, and chance encounters of nomadic peoples. Agricultural and
pastoral people—and even more so, the civilized—have a secret
weapon that gives them an advantage over others: disease. A disease that is very nasty when it fi rst arrives gradually
becomes less virulent in a population that has lived with it for
many generations. This means that when civilized peoples with
long contact with the disease meet the comparatively uncivilized
and isolated (hunter-gatherers), they wipe them out—sometimes
completely, because they have had no previous contact.What Did the First Civilizations Eat?
The fi rst civilizations ate wheat and its relatives; barley, chickpeas,
and lentils all provided the staple base. Such foods are relatively
high in protein but are composed mostly of starch, and you have
to eat more of it just to stay fuelled. The fi rst civilizations also ate
cabbages, lettuces, and a small amount of animal protein from goats,
sheep, cows, and pigs, which were all eventually domesticated. Dairy products were almost totally new in the human diet. It is
pretty certain that human beings did not evolve an ability to digest
milk past infancy because in many places that don’t regularly drink
milk, there is still lactose intolerance, which is the inability to break
down lactose in milk. Only in places where they have depended
on milk for many centuries does this intolerance become less
pronounced.