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Preface

Michael G. Sargent-2005-02-28-Cambridge University Press eBooks
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TL;DRAbstract

How to breed successfully, how to avoid disease, and how to live to a decent age are questions that have perplexed our ancestors throughout recorded time. As humans explored new lifestyles and habitats, each new challenge – whether it was agriculture, urban living, colonisation of new territories, domestication of animals, or industrialisation – could have notable rewards but was usually fraught with unpredictable physiological penalties. The history of our species is marked by technical solutions that have made these problems of human biology bearable. Some originated in common sense – the piped water and closed sewers of the nineteenth-century metropolis – and others in the application of science, but even these could sometimes produce less-than-satisfactory outcomes and, in some instances, disaster.

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How to breed successfully, how to avoid disease, and how to live to a decent age are questions that have perplexed our ancestors throughout recorded time. As humans explored new lifestyles and habitats, each new challenge – whether it was agriculture, urban living, colonisation of new territories, domestication of animals, or industrialisation – could have notable rewards but was usually fraught with unpredictable physiological penalties. The history of our species is marked by technical solutions that have made these problems of human biology bearable. Some originated in common sense – the piped water and closed sewers of the nineteenth-century metropolis – and others in the application of science, but even these could sometimes produce less-than-satisfactory outcomes and, in some instances, disaster.

Keywords

DomesticationColonisationIndustrialisationBreedGeographyHistoryEcologyEnvironmental ethics

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