A.There's no doubt about it. Agriculture made dense human settlements possible, and there are probably hundreds if not thousands of significant human traits that were selected in response to those radically new environments. This is one of Jared Diamond's key points in Guns, Germs, and Steel: Living in dense communities next to livestock created a whole new class of human diseases that agrarians eventually developed a resistance to, which subsequently enabled them to "conquer" hunter-gatherer communities that hadn't been exposed to the same organisms. And Richard Manning has made the point that the origins of sickle-cell anemia, for instance, coincide neatly with those of agriculture; clearing the forests in those parts of the world created an environment in which mosquitoes flourish, and because carriers of the sickle-cell gene are largely protected against malaria, those genes quickly spread through the human population.
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