Brenna Hassett.
Built on Bones: 15,000 years of urban life and death.
Bloomsbury. 2017
Using research on skeletal remains from around the world, Brenna Hassett explores the history of humanity’s experiment with non-foraging life, and why we have largely stuck with it. It explains the diseases, the deaths and the many other misadventures that we have unwittingly unleashed upon ourselves throughout our metropolitan past, and as the world becomes increasingly urbanised, what we can look forward to in the future.
Telling the tale of shifts in human health that have occurred as we transitioned from a mobile to a largely settled species, Built on Bones offers a fascinating insight into a critical but relatively unheralded aspect of the human story – our recent evolution.