Nomadic humans lived a relatively healthy lifestyle compared to early farmers and city dwellers. Being constantly on the move kept people in good shape, and the low population density meant they were less exposed to disease. But the advent of early farming and the evolution of urban living had some huge initial impacts on health and lifestyle — and not all of them were positive.
The ancient proto-city of Çatalhöyük — a large, densely-packed village situated in modern-day Turkey from roughly 7,100 B.C. to 6,000 B.C. — has revealed some of these shifts that humans experienced in the dawn of agriculture.
“It’s kind of a microcosm of what’s happening globally during the Neolithic, the period of first farming,” says Clark Larsen, a biological anthropologist at The Ohio State University.
