Imagine you are a hunter-gatherer some 15000 years ago You've got a choice
- carry on foraging or plant a few seeds & move to one of those new-fangled settlements down the valley What you won't know is that urban life is short & riddled with dozens of new diseases; your children will be shorter & sicklier than you are they'll be plagued with gum disease & stand a decent chance of a violent death at the point of a spear Why would anyone choose this? This is one of the many intriguing questions tackled by Brenna Hassett in Built on Bones Using research on skeletal remains from around the world this book explores the history of humanity's experiment with the metropolis & looks at why our ancestors chose city life & why they have largely stuck to it It explains the diseases the deaths & the many other misadventures that we have unwittingly unleashed upon ourselves throughout the metropolitan past & as the world becomes increasingly urbanised what we can look forward to in the future Telling the tale of shifts in human growth & health that have occurred as we transitioned from a mobile to a largely settled species Built on Bones offers an accessible insight into a critical but relatively unheralded aspect of the human story our recent evolution