Re: Yersinia pestis (Minnich's research bacterium) found in ancient human bones.

  RonO wrote:

A hunter gatherer diet is much better than an agricultural diet, and they might not have been very good farmers.  The advantage of agriculture is that it can sustain larger populations on the same amount of land, but those populations do not have to be very healthy.

I have heard much the same thing for my entire life; lifespans began
to drop with the switch from hunter-gatherer to agriculture. The
advantage appears to be population densities -- a simple matter of
how many mouths you can feed.
People didn't live even as long as Neanderthals but, evolution
works at the level of a population not an individual....
I've often argued this point with Aquatic Ape as exploiting the sea
can support a higher population density than inland hunter gathering.
Looking at Chimps:  The savanna supports the  _Lowest_ population
density!  So the idea that humans could have evolutionarily benefited
from a reduced gene pool seems odd, to say the least.
--
https://jtem.tumblr.com/tagged/The%20Book%20of%20JTEM/page/5