"Domestication, it turns out, was a decidedly mixed blessing for humans."

Great Scott

George Scialabba

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
by James Scott
Yale University Press, 312 pp., USD$26.

Domestication, it turns out, was a decidedly mixed blessing for humans. Judging from fossils, cereal-based diets were associated with shorter stature, bone distress, iron-deficiency anemia, and other deficits. The domus—the module including house and outbuildings, livestock yards, gardens, etc.—attracted hordes of commensals: not only dogs, pigs, and other mammals but also rodents, sparrows, insects, and weeds, as well as all their associated parasites and disease organisms, for which the domus was an ideal environment. A loss of alertness and emotional reactivity—the invariable result of animal domestication—may have similarly occurred among human domus-dwellers. And so labor-intensive was life in the domus that, Scott writes, “if we squint at the matter from a slightly different angle, one could argue that it is we who have been domesticated.”⁴