Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Built on Bones
Author: HASSETT BRENNA
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/04/2018
Imprint: BLOOMSBURY
Price: $20.00
Publishing status: Active
Imagine you are a hunter-gatherer some 12,000 years ago. You ‘ve got a choice carry on foraging, or plant a few seeds and move to one of those new-fangled settlements down the valley. What you won ‘t know is that city life is short, brutish, and riddled with dozens of new diseases, your children will be shorter and sicklier than you are, they ‘ll be plagued with gum disease, and stand a decent chance of a violent death at the point of a spear.
Why would anyone choose this’
But choose they did. Why’ This is one of the many intriguing questions tackled by Brenna Hassett in The Urban Ape. Based on research on skeletal remains from around the world, this book explores the 12,000-year history of humanity ‘s experiment with the metropolis, and looks at why our ancestors chose city life, and by and large have stuck to it. It explains the diseases, the deaths and the many other misadventures that we have unwittingly unleashed upon ourselves throughout the urban past, and as the world becomes increasingly urbanised, what we can look forward to in the future.
The Urban Ape offers an accessible insight into a critical but relatively unheralded aspect of the human story- our recent evolution. It tells the story of shifts in human longevity, growth and health that have occurred as we transitioned from a mobile to a largely settled species. Beginning with the very earliest experiments in settling down, the narrative moves slowly forward in time, with each chapter discussing a new element of humanity ‘s great urban experiment.
In the first section of the book, the major differences between hunter-gatherers and sedentary farmers are considered in chapters that cover the drop in life-expectancy associated with the Neolithic revolution, our changing relationship with animals and their diseases, and critical changes in our health that came with farming. In the second, the effects of true urban living are covered, from some of the earliest cities; the effects of overcrowding and population density in terms of disease and interpersonal violence are examined in remains excavated from Peru to Spain.
In the third section, the diseases of the great empires are examined, and the effects of war, plague and social inequality on human lives, and in its final section we come to the great interplay of social inequalities, diseases, and population that has seen some diseases disappear (such as leprosy), while others like tuberculosis scar modern cities to this day. The book concludes with a review of the many ways in which cities have affected our increasingly urban physical lives, and asks why city life can be deemed so successful, no matter how many individuals fall foul of numerous urban blights.
ISBN: 9781472922960
Pages: 320