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It's not good of course, and will have health repercussions. But I remember that sitting around a campfire or in a hut with a fire going all your life is the w

It's not good of course, and will have health repercussions. But I remember that sitting around a campfire or in a hut with a fire going all your life is the way people lived for the first million years. And I hope we have some resilience to smoke.

Spooky23 4y ago
True, but the problems with soot and smoke in densely populated areas were a well known downside of urban life. Rich kids with asthma spent summers at the country manor.
dymk 4y ago
Most of us died before the age of 30 during that period of time
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Low life expectancy at birth due to humans dying during infant/child years due to disease and other causes is not indicative of effects of living in huts around campfires.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    My ancestors lived in thatched roof cottages with open fires and livestock. Soot and smoke was one of many hazards.
- FiberBundle 4y ago
  Average life expectancy for hunter gatherers was low due to infant mortality. If people didn't die as an infant their life expectancy was actually fairly high (~70 years).
  - gruez 4y ago
    While you're right in principle, the life expectancy after childhood is nowhere as high as you claim. From wikipedia >Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 60% probability of reaching 15.
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  I have an obligation to deboonk this meme wherever I see it. I apologize for my self-righteous zealotry, but I have no choice. When we hear about average life expectancies of the days of yore, infant mortality is almost always factored into this calculation. The truth is, if a human made it past infancy, their life expectancy approached 65+. So, when speaking of cavemen or Ancient Egyptians or whatever, when we hear "average life expectancy of ~30", or "most of us died before 30", it's technically and semantically correct when including all those babes that died in their first year or two of life, but it's misleading and thus not very useful. I don't know if it's historians and anthropologists trying to be cute or pedantic or what, but I wish this meme would just die, because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past.
  - jacobsimon 4y ago
    This is a great breakdown of stats on life expectancy over time including child mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy Life expectancy has improved a lot in general, but less dramatically at old ages.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    > ...because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past. I assume this is at least partly deliberate, because it's a major part of what has been termed the "Religion of Progress," in which the history of humanity, when you squint hard enough and ignore most of the actual history, is a "rising line from the caves to the stars." Life in the past must be worse than life today in every reasonable way you can describe it, and life in the future must be better than today, because this is what's demanded by the current myths. The problem, of course, is that any moderately in depth study of the history of humanity demonstrates that this absolutely hasn't been the case, outside the effects of the industrial revolution from the past 250 years or so - which, as is now becoming rather obvious, has some serious downsides as well as the assorted miracles it's produced. And the focus of some of the (if not brightest, at least best paid) members of society on tricking other people into staring at a bunch of tiny flickering dots for as long as they possibly (while the world is literally burning around them) can doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's going to be considered particularly well in the future. Not that we should be praising it right now. JM Greer has done some solid writing on the "Religion of Progress" concept, and it's just depressing how often you see life and history crammed into that mold, because it's the way we've been trained to think of the world. It's also going to be responsible (or is being responsible) for a lot of mental anguish when reality refuses to deliver what we think the future ought to be. Humans won't go to the stars. We probably won't ever have flying cars, Jetsons-style. Etc.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
We don't at all we just accepted the consequences as we mostly had no way to avoid them.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Don't be so sure! Humans have had more genetic change in the last 50,000 years than in the 1M before that. One train of thought is, civilization put entirely new pressures on us and we adapted. Smoke has been with us for a very long time. It's almost certain that we have some adaptation to it.
dahart 4y ago
Some places in the world still use indoor fires for cooking and heating, like Mongolia, Africa and India, and they have a lung health crisis there, with astronomical rates of athsma, pneumonia, and lung cancer. We do have some resilience to mild amounts of occasional smoke, which keeps us from dying immediately, but we know long term exposure does damage, and the levels we’re seeing in the mega-fires has been far beyond what we’re evolved to breathe. Even the typical pollution in urban areas is measurably bad for health.
sneak 4y ago
https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion
- bombcar 4y ago
  Cooking has a similar air quality problem; cooking with gas even more so. Proper air filtration and maintenance is something to pay attention to in new builds.
jacobolus 4y ago
From first-hand experience (my parents are anthropologists): Spending nights in a small earth-floor house with a wood fire in the middle is warm and convenient for cooking but the smoke is absolutely miserable, even after you sort of get used to it. It stings your eyes and your throat, chokes you, and long-term exposure causes all sorts of nasty health consequences (lung cancer, ...). It’s much worse than the second-hand smoke from the smokiest cigarette-smoke-filled room you have ever experienced. (When people argue that the pre-industrial past was better because there was no air pollution, it’s hard not to laugh.) It’s a kind of romantic rustic experience occasionally in your life just to get an idea what rural people’s lives have been like throughout history and for a change from a sanitized suburban lifestyle, but it’s very unhealthy for people who have to live that way all the time. It’s little surprise that when people obtain the resources and infrastructure to switch to some other method of heating/cooking, they leap at the chance.

Spooky23 4y ago

True, but the problems with soot and smoke in densely populated areas were a well known downside of urban life. Rich kids with asthma spent summers at the country manor.

dymk 4y ago

Most of us died before the age of 30 during that period of time

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Low life expectancy at birth due to humans dying during infant/child years due to disease and other causes is not indicative of effects of living in huts around campfires.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  My ancestors lived in thatched roof cottages with open fires and livestock. Soot and smoke was one of many hazards.
FiberBundle 4y ago
Average life expectancy for hunter gatherers was low due to infant mortality. If people didn't die as an infant their life expectancy was actually fairly high (~70 years).
- gruez 4y ago
  While you're right in principle, the life expectancy after childhood is nowhere as high as you claim. From wikipedia >Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 60% probability of reaching 15.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
I have an obligation to deboonk this meme wherever I see it. I apologize for my self-righteous zealotry, but I have no choice. When we hear about average life expectancies of the days of yore, infant mortality is almost always factored into this calculation. The truth is, if a human made it past infancy, their life expectancy approached 65+. So, when speaking of cavemen or Ancient Egyptians or whatever, when we hear "average life expectancy of ~30", or "most of us died before 30", it's technically and semantically correct when including all those babes that died in their first year or two of life, but it's misleading and thus not very useful. I don't know if it's historians and anthropologists trying to be cute or pedantic or what, but I wish this meme would just die, because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past.
- jacobsimon 4y ago
  This is a great breakdown of stats on life expectancy over time including child mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy Life expectancy has improved a lot in general, but less dramatically at old ages.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > ...because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past. I assume this is at least partly deliberate, because it's a major part of what has been termed the "Religion of Progress," in which the history of humanity, when you squint hard enough and ignore most of the actual history, is a "rising line from the caves to the stars." Life in the past must be worse than life today in every reasonable way you can describe it, and life in the future must be better than today, because this is what's demanded by the current myths. The problem, of course, is that any moderately in depth study of the history of humanity demonstrates that this absolutely hasn't been the case, outside the effects of the industrial revolution from the past 250 years or so - which, as is now becoming rather obvious, has some serious downsides as well as the assorted miracles it's produced. And the focus of some of the (if not brightest, at least best paid) members of society on tricking other people into staring at a bunch of tiny flickering dots for as long as they possibly (while the world is literally burning around them) can doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's going to be considered particularly well in the future. Not that we should be praising it right now. JM Greer has done some solid writing on the "Religion of Progress" concept, and it's just depressing how often you see life and history crammed into that mold, because it's the way we've been trained to think of the world. It's also going to be responsible (or is being responsible) for a lot of mental anguish when reality refuses to deliver what we think the future ought to be. Humans won't go to the stars. We probably won't ever have flying cars, Jetsons-style. Etc.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

We don't at all we just accepted the consequences as we mostly had no way to avoid them.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Don't be so sure! Humans have had more genetic change in the last 50,000 years than in the 1M before that. One train of thought is, civilization put entirely new pressures on us and we adapted. Smoke has been with us for a very long time. It's almost certain that we have some adaptation to it.

dahart 4y ago

Some places in the world still use indoor fires for cooking and heating, like Mongolia, Africa and India, and they have a lung health crisis there, with astronomical rates of athsma, pneumonia, and lung cancer. We do have some resilience to mild amounts of occasional smoke, which keeps us from dying immediately, but we know long term exposure does damage, and the levels we’re seeing in the mega-fires has been far beyond what we’re evolved to breathe. Even the typical pollution in urban areas is measurably bad for health.

sneak 4y ago

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-fireplace-delusion

bombcar 4y ago
Cooking has a similar air quality problem; cooking with gas even more so. Proper air filtration and maintenance is something to pay attention to in new builds.

jacobolus 4y ago

From first-hand experience (my parents are anthropologists): Spending nights in a small earth-floor house with a wood fire in the middle is warm and convenient for cooking but the smoke is absolutely miserable, even after you sort of get used to it. It stings your eyes and your throat, chokes you, and long-term exposure causes all sorts of nasty health consequences (lung cancer, ...). It’s much worse than the second-hand smoke from the smokiest cigarette-smoke-filled room you have ever experienced. (When people argue that the pre-industrial past was better because there was no air pollution, it’s hard not to laugh.) It’s a kind of romantic rustic experience occasionally in your life just to get an idea what rural people’s lives have been like throughout history and for a change from a sanitized suburban lifestyle, but it’s very unhealthy for people who have to live that way all the time. It’s little surprise that when people obtain the resources and infrastructure to switch to some other method of heating/cooking, they leap at the chance.