ABSTRACT
It is well known that people fall ill even in conditions of plenty, and even with high standards of living. Although it cannot be denied that dietary practices play a major role in individual and group health, it would be a mistake to think that simple correlations with subsistence practices are valid. When we look at past human cultures we often generalize or simplify the picture. These simplifications are not solely based on the limitations of our evidence for ancient health (usually only skeletal non-specific indicators), but are also built into our models of how subsistence, nutrition and health interacted in past societies. Until the 1970s for example, it was very much accepted that human societies progressed in a single direction towards modernity, starting from hunter-gatherers towards agriculturalists (e.g., Childe 1956; Braidwood 1960; for a review see Barker and Janowski 2011), and using such a framework it was not problematic to interpret direct correlations between subsistence strategy and human health, progressing over time towards better health and medical care.
