Microbes In Deadly Companions

In the first four chapters of Deadly Companions author Crawford takes us on a journey on how microbes shaped our history. Starting with when microbes first appeared on planet Earth to Darwinian evolution of single celled organism. In chapter two “Our Microbial Inheritance” she discussed the relationship of microbes with hunter-gatherers and early settlements; and their relationship to disease. She looks at the impact of microbes on the lives of individuals and the population as a whole.

Hunter-gatherers were small groups of people that hunted for food, moving from place to place. They lived in small groups of thirty to fifty people and were always hunting for food, necessary for their survival. They moved with the season, following herd and crop cycle, hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering wild fruits, roots, leaves and seeds. Their lifestyle was idealized as being in tune with nature. Then Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century English philosopher stated that their life was a war against all. The hunter-gather life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Prior to this major change, hunter- gathers was descried to be reasonably healthy. As Crawford stated the transmission routes for microbes were barred during the hunter- gatherer era because of the small size, isolation and mobility of the bands. But the skeletal remains clearly show that hunter-gatherers did not generally die of starvation or injury, but bones on their own are not very useful for providing evidence of infectious disease since microbes generally do not leave fossil evidence of their presence. Crawford explained that even though there is a lack of evidence of exactly what microbes aided in the death of hunter-gatherers, experts believe that infectious disease were among the commonest causes of death but the nature of these disease can only be guessed at by using present day knowledge of