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As agriculture developed, about ten thousand years
ago, which greatly increased the use of grains as food,
the amount of vegetables in the diet became as great as
90 percent, with a drastic decline in the amount of meat.
European humans thirty thousand years ago, with a high
intake of meat, were about 6 inches taller than their de-
scendants after the development of agriculture. Eaton
and Konner state that “The same pattern was repeated
later in the New World: the Paleo-indians were big-game
hunters 10,000 years ago, but their descendants, in the
period just before European contact, practiced inten-
sive food production, ate little meat, were considerably
shorter, and had skeletal manifestations of suboptimal
nutrition, which apparently reflect both the direct effects
of protein-calorie deficiency and the synergistic inter-
action between malnutrition and infection. Since the
Industrial Revolution, the animal-protein content of
Western diets has become more nearly adequat