Kyle Harper

It's one of these things that's more of a process than an event.

But it has massive implications for human health, including the infectious disease environment that we inhabit.

So it's not like hunter-gatherers were living in paradise.

Like the infectious diseases that they had were seriously burdensome.

They sucked and probably most people died of infectious disease.

Malaria is a really, really old disease.

Lots of diseases existed in the Pleistocene in like our Paleolithic past.

So it's not like it was eaten.

But there is this idea that the transition from foraging to farming – I mean Jared Diamond called it humanity's biggest mistake.

And the –

And certainly these changes entailed some things that were not positive net for humanity.

And one of them is that it definitely increased the infectious disease burden.

So simply as our population multiplies and as we're in contact with feces and as we're sharing the air through which respiratory pathogens can spread, diseases are constantly increasing.

trying to take advantage of this.

That's just how nature works.

Energy is scarce.

Everybody is trying to steal it from everybody else, including microbial parasites.

And so the disease burden of humans over time definitely increases.

And the burden of infectious disease on humans goes up over time.

So very broadly across these thousands and thousands of