Measuring Social Performance over the Millennia: The Long-Term Decline in Health in Pre-Columbian America
نویسنده
چکیده
Lack of evidence has been the major obstacle to understanding trends and differences in human welfare over the millennia. This paper explains and applies methods that are obscure to most academics and essentially unknown to the general public. A millennial perspective is best obtained from skeletal remains, which depict not only childhood health conditions but also processes of degeneration that accompany aging and strenuous physical effort. Compiled into an index of health, data from 65 localities as part of a large collaborative project on the Western Hemisphere reveal a long-term decline in health in pre-Columbian America, a trend driven by population movements into less healthy ecological environments. The approach can shed light prime movers of long-run economic growth, human adaptation to climate change, and the effects of geographic conditions on social performance.
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