Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death

Using clues from teeth and skeletal remains, an archaeologist explores our 15,000-year evolution into city dwellers, from our first settlements to the urban sprawl of the Industrial Age.
Humans and their immediate ancestors were successful hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, but in the last fifteen thousand years humans have gone from finding food to farming it, from seasonal camps to sprawling cities, from a few people to hordes. Drawing on her own fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, and beyond, archaeologist Brenna Hassett explores the long history of urbanization through revolutionary changes written into the bones of the people who lived it.