Built on Bones

15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death

Brenna Hassett

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English

Bloomsbury Publishing
01 April 2018

Archaeology; Society & Social Sciences; Social & cultural anthropology; Popular science; Human biology

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.

By: Brenna Hassett
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm,
Weight: 270g
ISBN: 9781472922960
ISBN 10: 1472922964
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 01 April 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Brenna Hassett is an archaeologist who specializes in using clues from the human skeleton to understand how people lived and died in the past. Her research focuses on the evidence of health and growth locked into teeth, and she uses dental anthropological techniques to investigate how children grew (or didn't) across the world and across time. She has dug poor Roman-period burials near the Giza pyramids, surveyed every last inch of a remote Greek island (with a goat-to-human ratio of 350:1), famous for the Antikythera mechanism, and accidentally crumbled an 8,000 year old mud brick wall at the famous central Anatolian site of Catalhoeyuk in Turkey. @brennawalks / trowelblazers.com

Reviews for Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death

Built on Bones is entertaining, colloquial and has a fine line in funny footnotes. * The Times * An upbeat, wisecracking attempt to trace the development of cities through thousands of years of human disease, violence and misery ... Amusing footnotes interrupt serious arguments, while pop culture references jostle with sobering research. * Guardian * This book explores how our journey from hunter-gatherers to urban dwellers has impacted our state of health. Using clues recovered from archaeological sites and ancient skeletal remains, it carefully highlights some of the unpleasant consequences of urbanisation. -- Dr Daniel Antoine, Curator of Physical Anthropology, The British Museum Fascinating subject matter ... a fun, addictive read. * Readers Digest *