In fact, vitamin deficiencies are rare, unless you do something outlandish like settle and live on crops. The reason humans need so many vitamins in the first place is that we could easily get them, so could easily drop synthetizing them to put more resources in growing brains to outsmart each other. Most animals need fewer vitamines.
I’m not aware of either a similar trade-off, much less a similar change in conditions (disease would have to become rare before agriculture, then common again), with disease.
Do you have a reference for any of that? It sounds reasonable that vitamin deficiencies are the result of farming, but the loss of synthesis to the specific demand of increasing brain size seems like a too specific hypothesis. In particular, almost no primates synthesize C, while almost all mammals do. Britannica lists six vitamins that no vertebrates synthesize (though it includes D, which all land animals synthesize by sunlight). Other than C, I was unable to track down claims about variation across species. Britannica claims that “more highly evolved” animals need more vitamins.
We don’t have much information about disease among hunter-gatherers. Intermediate pastoralists are more accessible. The book Diseases in Human Evolution seems relevant. Chapter 19 lists many historical accounts of vitamin deficiency. Many were not the result not of all farming, but of the wrong grain. Scurvy was seasonal.
I’ve also heard a plausible argument that agriculture results in much less mineral content in the soil. Note that organic agriculture as usually defined isn’t going to solve the problem—the manure from animals eating plants from lower mineral soil doesn’t get the mineral level back up.
Nothing but deliberately putting minerals back (which ones? how much?) or another glacial period is going to change the situation.
I don’t think evolution always compensates for changed conditions—sometimes the pathways aren’t available, sometimes the lucky chance doesn’t happen, and, after all, you don’t have to get back to the previous level of competence—your competitors are operating under the same constrained conditions you are.
In fact, vitamin deficiencies are rare, unless you do something outlandish like settle and live on crops. The reason humans need so many vitamins in the first place is that we could easily get them, so could easily drop synthetizing them to put more resources in growing brains to outsmart each other. Most animals need fewer vitamines.
I’m not aware of either a similar trade-off, much less a similar change in conditions (disease would have to become rare before agriculture, then common again), with disease.
Do you have a reference for any of that? It sounds reasonable that vitamin deficiencies are the result of farming, but the loss of synthesis to the specific demand of increasing brain size seems like a too specific hypothesis. In particular, almost no primates synthesize C, while almost all mammals do. Britannica lists six vitamins that no vertebrates synthesize (though it includes D, which all land animals synthesize by sunlight). Other than C, I was unable to track down claims about variation across species. Britannica claims that “more highly evolved” animals need more vitamins.
We don’t have much information about disease among hunter-gatherers. Intermediate pastoralists are more accessible. The book Diseases in Human Evolution seems relevant. Chapter 19 lists many historical accounts of vitamin deficiency. Many were not the result not of all farming, but of the wrong grain. Scurvy was seasonal.
I’ve also heard a plausible argument that agriculture results in much less mineral content in the soil. Note that organic agriculture as usually defined isn’t going to solve the problem—the manure from animals eating plants from lower mineral soil doesn’t get the mineral level back up.
Nothing but deliberately putting minerals back (which ones? how much?) or another glacial period is going to change the situation.
I don’t think evolution always compensates for changed conditions—sometimes the pathways aren’t available, sometimes the lucky chance doesn’t happen, and, after all, you don’t have to get back to the previous level of competence—your competitors are operating under the same constrained conditions you are.