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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Recurso digital |
| Language: | |
| Published: |
Zenodo
2025
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17791561 |
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Table of Contents:
- The transition from foraging to farming during the Holocene epoch represents the most profound ecological and social transformation in human history. While the Neolithic Revolution is traditionally celebrated for enabling sedentism, population growth, and complex societies, its epidemiological consequences were equally transformative, though largely negative. This paper posits that the dispersal of agricultural systems was not merely a passive backdrop for disease but an active vector for the emergence, evolution, and dissemination of novel pathogens. We synthesize evidence from paleopathology, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, and pathogen genomics to argue that the constituent elements of agriculture—animal domestication, landscape modification, increased population density, and food storage—created a synergistic 'contagion package'. This package facilitated repeated zoonotic spillovers from newly domesticated livestock, established endemic cycles for crowd diseases, and engineered novel ecologies for disease vectors. By examining the spatial and temporal correlation between the spread of specific agricultural complexes (e.g., Near Eastern cereals and livestock, East Asian rice paddies) and the estimated molecular divergence dates of major human pathogens (e.g., measles virus, *Mycobacterium tuberculosis*), we demonstrate a causal link. Agricultural dispersal effectively cultivated landscapes of contagion, fundamentally reshaping the co-evolutionary trajectory of humans and their pathogens and setting the stage for the global burden of infectious disease observed today.