Antibiotic Resistance

How we destroyed one of the two most important inventions of the modern era

Allan Milne Lees
7 min readSep 24, 2024
Image credit: University of Oregon

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived short and brutal lives, with very few surviving to the end of their third decade of existence. After the end of the last ice-age and the subsequent largely accidental development of agriculture, the number of humans alive at any moment in time slowly increased as additional calories were translated into additional mouths. Small settlements grew to become villages, villages grew to become towns, some towns became city-states, and eventually empires were forged by ambitious warlords. Very slowly, our ancestors began to engineer their environments in response to this population growth.

Some were very successful: famously, the Romans developed conveniences such as fresh running water and a sewage system that removed human waste from underfoot, as well as underfloor heating in villas and excellent roads. These conveniences enabled many of the affluent members of society to live to comparatively old age, so that it was not uncommon to find individuals surviving into their sixties and sometimes even beyond. But for the most part the average life expectancy was far lower, as infant mortality and infectious diseases continued to kill a very significant percentage of the population even in the most sophisticated cultures.

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Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.