ABSTRACT
Organisms that cause disease can also maintain themselves in small groups of people if pathogen lingers to infect newly susceptible individuals who are born into or join the group. The hunting-gathering way of life, free of modern influences, seems to have been a health-promoting lifestyle. Food was varied and nutritious. Infectious and parasitic diseases were less of a threat than they were in farming villages. The shift from food gathering to food producing occurred independently in several areas around world. In settled villages, new problems with sanitation arose, and new types of diseases evolved. Bioarchaeology links archaeologists' studies of the environment and material culture to evidence in associated skeletal remains as studied by physical anthropologists and paleopathologists to create a timeline for the ecology of health. The Black Mesa research covers only a few centuries in the prehistory of the American Southwest. In time, people stopped making their seasonal visits to the top of the dry, inhospitable mesa.
