Conclusions

Today we live in an agriculturally driven world within a global population that, in general terms, relies on agriculture for its food source. Hunter-gatherers are increasingly being marginalized, so that many become acculturated and ‘forced' by circumstances to adopt an agricultural diet, along with its consequences.

Overall, health declines over time and with the transition to agriculture, as does the quality of the diet, but it is important to note that this interpreta­tion can be very variable. In some studies improvements in health and diet do occur, so assumptions cannot be made with any degree of reliability. Specific conditions in which people lived can lead to very different conclu­sions about their health, emphasizing the need to consider each site studied on an individual basis. While synthetic studies are becoming more common in bioarchaeology, these studies do highlight that individuals and populations can be variable in their responses to subsistence changes, and there are many potential variables throughout the world over time that will ultimately affect the data interpretation.

In the future, without doubt, bioarchaeological studies will continue to focus on this first epidemiological transition. While macroscopic methods of analysis will be the primary vehicle for data generation, due to low costs, biomolecular analyses will be used more often to explore diet and mobility (especially as costs decline), and ancient DNA analysis will be used more to consider genetic attributes of ‘populations', and answer questions about migration relating to the first farmers. Using DNA analysis may also help to unravel those skeletal conditions that have both genetic and environmen­tal components. Teams from different disciplines working holistically to place the data in context, and using ‘cutting-edge' analytical methods, will surely nuance our understanding of people in the past living in a world with agriculture.