Mobility of early humans

____During the upper Paleolithic stage, subsistence seems focused on relatively easily available foods of high nutritional value, such as large herd animals and migratory fish. Some plant foods seem to have been eaten, but they appear not to have been quantitatively important in the diet. Storage of foods appears early in many sequences, even during the Paleolithic, apparently to save seasonal surpluses for consumption during seasons of low productivity.
____As hunting and gathering economies evolve during the Mesolithic [period of transition between hunting/gathering and agriculture], subsistence is expanded by exploitation of increasing numbers of species and by increasingly heavy exploitation of the more abundant and productive plant species. The inclusion of significant amounts of plant food in prehistoric diets seems to correlate with increased use of food processing tools, apparently to improve their taste and digestibility. As [Dr. Mark Nathan] Cohen suggests, there is an increasing focus through time on a few starchy plants of high productivity and storability. This process of subsistence intensification occurs even in regions where native agriculture never developed. In California, for example, as hunting-gathering populations grew, subsistence changed from an early pattern of reliance on game and varied plant resources to to one with increasing emphasis on collection of a few species of starchy seeds and nuts.
____...As [Dr. Cohen] predicts, evolutionary change in prehistoric subsistence has moved in the direction of higher carrying capacity foods, not toward foods of higher-quality nutrition or greater reliability. Early nonagricultural diets appear to have been high in minerals, protein, vitamins, and trace nutrients, but relatively low in starch. In the development toward agriculture there is a growing emphasis on starchy, highly caloric food of high productivity and storability, changes that are not favorable to nutritional quality but that would have acted to increase carrying capacity, as Cohen's theory suggests.

Paleopathology, pp. 565-568.

Most [studies] conclude that infection was a more common and more serious problem for farmers than for their hunting and gathering forebears; and most suggest that this resulted from some combination of increasing sedentism, larger population aggregates, and the well-established synergism between infection and malnutrition.