Built on Bones by Brenna Hassett review – have cities been good for humans?

A bioarchaeologist looks at skeletons to find out how people have lived and died, and reveals the paleo diet is all wrong

“If cities are so great, why are they full of things that kill us?”, archaeologist Brenna Hassett asks. Her book is an upbeat, wisecracking attempt to trace the development of cities through thousands of years of human disease, violence and misery. In Built on Bones, amusing footnotes interrupt serious arguments, while pop culture references jostle with sobering research.

The book takes in a broad sweep of human history, showing how humans went from being hunter-gatherer nomads to being sedentary farmers, and how becoming anchored to one location created a link between ownership and status. “Material wealth becomes a place, a defensible territory,” Hassett writes. Settlements grow, eventually, into cities, and the inequality inherent in place-as-wealth becomes more starkly visible in urban space.

Just as the networks of the Roman world enabled the spread of TB, so too did later trade routes