10,000–6000 BCE: (Agriculture and the Transformation of Human Disease Ecology — Population Growth in Combination with New Farming and Herding Economies Forev…

10,000–6000 BCE: (Agriculture and the Transformation of Human Disease Ecology — Population Growth in Combination with New Farming and Herding Economies Forever Changing the Relations of Humans to Disease, Population Growth Itself Increasing Potentials for Disease Transmission, Increasingly Sedentary Habitation with Hamlets and Villages and Nearby Rubbish Dumps Attracting Disease-Bearing Scavengers Such as Rats, the Herding of Animals Bringing Them into Recurrent Close Contact with Human Inhabitants Creating New Pathways for Zoonotic Disease, and Land Clearing for Cultivation in Early West African Agriculture Leading to Increased Standing Water and the Spread of Malaria via Anopheles Mosquitoes): In the Age of Agricultural Beginnings, from the tenth to the sixth millennia BCE, population growth in combination with the new farming and herding economies had a further major consequence: it forever changed the relations of humans to disease. In part, the growth of human population itself, even in those times of still extremely low population densities, increased the potentials for disease transmission. But in addition, it was an age marked by increasingly sedentary habitation patterns, with the emergence in many places of hamlets or multifamily villages, typically with nearby sites for dumping community rubbish — conditions that would have further enhanced the risk of infection by attracting potentially disease-bearing scavengers such as rats. Over the same eras, the activities of food production themselves also opened up new pathways for disease transmission. One potential source of new diseases was the animals that people, whether in Eurasia or Africa, began to herd and to protect at night by bringing them into enclosures either within or next to the family homestead, and thus into recurrent close contact with the human inhabitants. The activities of cultivation could also change the environments around farming communities in ways that opened new possibilities for disease spread. Clearing land for cultivation in early West African agriculture appears to have led to increased areas of standing water in which Anopheles mosquitoes, the vectors of malaria transmission to humans, could breed in the rainy season. Because of these human activities, malaria had become, even several thousand years ago, a major disease in Africa. The agricultural revolution was not merely an economic transformation. It was an epidemiological catastrophe. Every step toward greater food security — sedentary living, animal husbandry, land clearing — simultaneously created new pathways for disease. The hamlets that stored grain also bred rats. The enclosures that protected cattle also incubated zoonotic pathogens. The cleared fields that grew fonio also pooled rainwater for mosquitoes. Malaria, which would become the single greatest killer in African history, was not a natural disaster visited upon passive victims. It was an unintended consequence of human ingenuity — the shadow side of the agricultural revolution, a price exacted by nature for the audacity of reshaping the landscape to serve human needs. Every civilization pays this price, and Africa paid it early.