Check out this short article by anthropologist Clark Spencer Larsen about the human transition from hunting, gathering, and foraging to agriculture. Pay close attention to the parts where it mentions the impacts upon human health:
Within a remarkably short period of time following the Pleistocene — when climate, vegetation, and fauna became essentially modern — human populations worldwide adopted plant cultivation as a subsistence strategy. The widespread extinction of various megafauna (e.g., mastadon, mammoth) and other animals may have been an impetus for human populations to begin to develop wholly new means of acquiring food in order to meet protein and fat requirements. Whatever the cause, the change in diet had profound implications for nutritional ecology, health, and behavior in human beings.
Read the rest here.
