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When humans domesticated animals and started tending to the fields is when IMO it all went down hill. That change brought in modern civilization with all its ad

• PeterHolzwarth 10mo ago
  You first. And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
  • nurettin 10mo ago
    To be fair, antibiotics are needed much more now that we have billions of hosts these organisms can evolve on rapidly.
  • defrost 10mo ago
    A lack of antibiotics wasn't sufficient reason to stay in western society for those members of the Pintupi Nine and other hunter gather families that came in, looked about, and left again. Some can't imagine life without antibiotics, others can't fathom living with everything else that comes with it.
    • Aloha 10mo ago
      They had a place that was familiar and comforting to go return to. Anyone who is of a modern industrialized society who is waxing poetically about becoming a hunter gatherer is both, looking at history thru very rose colored goggles and welcome to go find a place to do just that.
      • defrost 10mo ago
        Alternatively they grew up with a foot in both worlds, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c Many people that have lived side by side with indigenous people across northern australia, the islands, PNG, et al have a clear idea of exactly what living off the land entails. A good many have done exactly that for extended periods, dropping in and out from one to the other. They would have done this sans any condescending permission from those wishing them well - such opinions count for naught.
        • Aloha 10mo ago
          Agreed.
    • tor825gl 10mo ago
      But you've selected one particular group. The thousands of groups and individuals who merged their way of life with that of farming/toolmaking/industrialised/modern human society do not have a name, they are just part of the human mainstream. Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or coercion. But many didn't. So many groups have wanted to participate in technological progress, even at the cost of giving up their previous way of life, that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted.
      • defrost 10mo ago
        > But But? > you've selected one particular group. I used as examples some specific individuals of one named group, yes. I also had in mind other specific individuals of a few other families - all these groups share the same major language group. There are other similar examples across the globe, of course, there's an entire island that famously prefers no contact- but I'm making a brief comment not writing a book. > Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or coercion. But many didn't. If I were to pursue this I'd likely argue that a majority of adaptions happened with more force, less willingness, and at a pace faster than desired by the less technologically advanced side. > So many groups have wanted to participate in technological progress, Indeed. Many are curious about water but didn't expect a hose shoved down their throats with a bucket load funnelled in endlessly with no off tap. > that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted. I'm assuming this refers to those groups that want to retain autonomy but have difficulty doing so. In many such cases that I'm aware of the problem stems less from former group members wanting to bring the outside in, more from outsiders (eg: loggers) wanting to clearfell habitat, miners wanting pits, etc. eg: The entire West of PNG not wanting rule by Indonesia, various "Indonesians" not wanting their dense jungle homes cleared for palm oil plantations, various groups in Brazil, Native American Indians not wanting pipes to cross ther lands, giant copper mines on sacred grounds, etc.
        • tor825gl 10mo ago
          You are making the same two errors again. You are focusing on the 0.01% of humanity which isn't part of mainstream modernity rather than the 99.99% which is. And you're discussing cases of extreme differential in technological knowledge and worldview (Amazon jungle, Papua New Guinea), rather than the vastly more common smaller gaps and asymmetries. If a majority of adaptations happened with force, how do you explain the ones that didn't? Don't they suggest that even without any force there would have been convergence, just more slowly? European settlers committed genocide against the native peoples of North America. I'm not denying that. But that happened in a context of a 400 year process of cultural exchanges and mergers in both directions. Arguably North Americans could not have ignored the written word or manufactured textiles in perpetuity, just as their societies adapted and mutated to accept the horse and steel tools.
  • rurp 10mo ago
    Many people did choose to live as hunter gatherers all over the world, until they were universally slaughtered and subjugated. We don't really know if industrial societies lead to more fullfilling lives or not, because they clearly lead to better and more expansive armies that quickly destroy anyone trying to live outside of that.
    • andsoitis 10mo ago
      > Many people did choose to live as hunter gatherers all over the world, until they were universally slaughtered and subjugated. There are still a number of uncontacted peoples and international groups that advocate for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
  • throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
    Maybe it's a herd immunity thing or something and others are keeping me safe, but I'm 41 and Ive never taken an antibiotic and neither has anyone else in my family to my knowledge. I still can't figure out if it's the chicken or the egg.. have I never been sick because I don't take part in the medical system, or do I not take part because I've never been sick.. Then again last time my cuticle got infected I sterilized a knife and drained it myself. My friend said he had something similar and they gave him an antibiotic yet DIDNT drain it until it got worse and then they just did what I did. But at least they got to sell some antibiotics.
    • manmal 10mo ago
      Antibiotics should IMO be reserved for life threatening situations, or likely upcoming life threatening situations. In the 80s as a toddler I was given antibiotics for measles (they can’t possibly work on viruses), and had half a year of diarrhea afterwards.
      • mcny 10mo ago
        It is funny you say that. Where do you draw the line? I had what was most likely poison ivy. Covered both arms. And was spreading. What do you propose my nurse practitioner to do? Not prescribe any antibiotics? To what end? I should continue to suffer because of what reason?
        • SturgeonsLaw 10mo ago
          Antibiotics do one thing, and one thing only - kill bacteria. They don't do anything for viruses, fungal infection, inflammation, chemical irritants or pain relief. In the case of poison ivy, all antibiotics would do is lower the already slim odds of a secondary infection. They wouldn't prevent the contact dermatitis/inflammation from urishiol.
          • mcny 10mo ago
            No. I had broken skin barrier. Pus coming out and dripping. The use of antibiotics was definitely warranted. Again, who do you want to decide whether the use of antibiotics is ok and under what conditions? Should I be dying before you grant me antibiotics? What kind of nonsense is this?
  • Gud 10mo ago
    You can’t survive as s hunter gatherer in the modern world.
  • manmal 10mo ago
    Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world; and no factory farming that incubates most of these diseases. Regarding your reference to how brutal and never-ending work was; As far as we know, many European medieval farmers had 1500-1800 working hours per year. It’s also a bit gloomy to assume the household was run by two parents and their kids - often, grandparents were colocated and helped until they couldn’t. What you‘ve described was certainly the case during famines and war, but not a permanent state.
    • majormajor 10mo ago
      insects, predator animals, cuts+bacteria all seem like quite hard-to-avoid disease vectors. we can spread disease quickly these days, but there are no shortage of ancient diseases you could've come across in a small hunter-gatherer society I believe the modern world creates a lot of mental health problems, loneliness, and unhappines, but it's absolutely physically safer and more survivable (and more comfortable) for a huge percentage of the developed world. (It creates those mental problems unnecessarily, given the level of technology we have, but deeply baked into our fairly-antisocial individualistic culture)
      • manmal 10mo ago
        I‘m not sure I agree on your second point. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and others are endemic to the developed world. My personal opinion here is that constant oversupply with calories is not something humans have been able to adapt to, yet.
        • WA 10mo ago
          We just live longer than back then and have way more opportunities to see these (mostly) late-life diseases. Same with cancer. Yes, average life span was shorter back then because of child mortality. But the vast majority of surviving adults never reached age 80. Old age was 60-70 and many of these diseases only occur at 70+ in significant numbers.
    • 10mo ago
  • palmotea 10mo ago
    > You first. He wasn't talking about going back, he was talking about staying. > And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you. I don't recall where I read this, but (probably hundreds of years ago) some explorer in Africa was on a boat with some hunter-gatherers. A bloated, rotting dead rat floated by, they picked it up, said "yum" and dug in. They didn't get sick. I've also read some speculation that (initially) fire wasn't needed so much for cooking meat, because hunter-gatherers can (and did) accomplish the same effect by letting meat rot a little. Fire was more useful for vegetables. So actual hunter gatherers probably had less need for antibiotics than a modern person thrust into a similar situation.
    • tumult 10mo ago
      That's from Arnold Henry Savage Landor and I suspect it was fabricated or exaggerated, like many Victorian era British tales of savages abroad.
  • Aloha 10mo ago
    Indeed! Antibiotics and Insulin - those two things have saves untold lives. Before about 1920, the difference between rich and poor and the likelihood to recover from disease had more to do with ability to rest and diet. The rich and poor alike died to tuberculosis (which was often a death sentence until antibiotics), simple cysts, all sorts of very basic bacterial infections killed in droves. At the risk of sidetracking this further - it was only after insulin where the idea that healthcare could be somewhat that could be a right became somewhat reasonable (before the late gilded age, doctors often did as much harm as good) - every lifesaving innovation we have made sense, were often very modest amounts of money is the difference between life and death make that argument stronger.
    • robocat 10mo ago
      > Antibiotics and Insulin - those two things have saves untold lives. Type 1 is about 0.5% prevalence. Type 1 diabetes was a rapid death sentence before insulin discovery in the 1920s. Type 2 is more common (maybe 10% but highly dependent on country) and it is a relatively modern problem Infant mortality has dropped to 0.5% from 7% 100 years ago - so that's more significant.
      • Aloha 10mo ago
        Better food, living conditions and sanitation has helped greatly.
  • Qwertious 10mo ago
    Stone age hunter-gatherers had better lives than stone-age farmers, assuming that they had enough land to hunt/gather on. Modern farming is usually far easier than modern hunting/gathering, although if you go far enough north you'll find that hunting is still the only viable option.
    • rhubarbtree 10mo ago
      Oh, really? Then why did they choose farming? And no, it wasn’t a trap, they experimented with farming and could have gone back to hunting if as you imply it truly was better.
      • amenhotep 10mo ago
        Farming supports war better than hunter gathering does.
        • troupo 10mo ago
          Translation: farming supports larger populations and more complex lifestyles better than hunter gathering.
    • carlosjobim 10mo ago
      Ever since the invention of the rifle, hunting has been far easier than farming.
      • bloomingeek 10mo ago
        I would argue that with the invention of the rifle, it was easier IF you could find game, especially since others living in your vicinity were hunting also. Despite the risk of weather and insects, farming was much more predictable as a food source.
        • carlosjobim 10mo ago
          That same logic should be applied to farming. Where would you find free farmland that nobody else is claiming?
• deleted 10mo ago
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• imtringued 10mo ago
  No matter what you think, and even if we build a super AI to ask it, about what we should do, the answer stays the same. We should build a mass driver on the moon.
• jstummbillig 10mo ago
  It's kind of an interesting question. What makes us inherently unhappy? I think if the theory goes that from a evolutionary standpoint we psychologically are still better equipped to be hunter gatherers, we should assume that our feelings towards homicide and child mortality are comparable. So how happy can a people be, when 40% of their children die and another 20% die by homicide? If we follow that thread I would argue that it's very unlikely that people were happier back when or would be happier today, unless some other component of being hunter gatherers makes us fantastically ecstatic.
  • nowittyusername 10mo ago
    What makes us unhappy are the things that the modern world takes away from us. Sense of agency, sense of community, belonging, autonomy, recognition, and many other factors. The modern day human brain and mind is still lagging far behind our current predicament. We evolved to thrive in small village cohorts that condition for small social interactions that have real impact on our lives. Here's a striking example I remember. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFOhAd3THW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFOhAd3THW4 There are better longer videos of the citation from the mothers side, where she talks about how alien and cold modern day society is compared to her humble village life. No amount of medicine, material possessions or modern day creature comforts could keep her in New York. she chose to leave and come back home because that's what made her happy.
    • jstummbillig 10mo ago
      That is a beautiful anecdote, but I don't see what we could reasonably generalize from that. It's fairly well established that access to good medical care and a certain degree of wealth make us happier. Could a life radically and willfully different in many ways turn out to be better for most of us (which is critically what you claimed before)? It's certainly possible, given how few people take this route, but an appeal to nature is just not super convincing, unless you can back it up with data. I can't help but notice you did not engage with how 40% of kids dieing and another 20% of us getting killed by some member of the cherished tribe could possible lead to high levels of life satisfaction. As far I can tell, on the whole, the good old days were cruel and rosy retrospection is just that.
• logicprog 10mo ago
  "Deprivation of material things, including food, was a general recollection [of Zhu adults] and the typical emotional tone in relation to it was one of frustration and anger…. Data on !Kung fertility in relation to body fat, on seasonal weight loss in some bands, and on the slowing of infant growth after the first six months of life all suggested that the previously described abundance had definite limits. Data on morbidity and mortality, though not necessarily relevant to abundance, certainly made use of the term “affluent” seem inappropriate." "While the !Kung way of life is far from one of uniform drudgery—there is a great deal of leisure in the !Kung camp, even in the worst time of the year—it is also true that the !Kung are very thin and complain often of hunger, at all times of the year. It is likely that hunger is a contributing cause to many deaths which are immediately caused by infectious and parasitic diseases, even though it is rare for anyone simply to starve to death." "The give and take of tangibles and intangibles goes on in the midst of a high level of bickering. Until one learns the cultural meaning of this continual verbal assault, the outsider wonders how the !Kung can stand to live with each other …. People continually dun the Europeans and especially the European anthropologists since unlike most Europeans, the anthropologists speak !Kung. In the early months of my own field work I despaired of ever getting away from continual harassment. As my knowledge of !Kung increased, I learned that the !Kung are equally merciless in dunning each other." "In reciprocal relations, one means that a person uses to prevent being exploited in a relationship … is to prevent him or herself from becoming a “have”…. As mentioned earlier, men who have killed a number of larger animals sit back for a pause to enjoy reciprocation. Women gather enough for their families for a few days, but rarely more …. And so, in deciding whether or not to work on a certain day, a !Kung may assess debts and debtors, decide how much wild food harvest will go to family, close relatives and others to whom he or she really wants to reciprocate, versus how much will be claimed by freeloaders." "The !Kung, we are told, spend a great deal of time talking about who has what and who gave what to whom or failed to give it to whom (Wiessner 1982:68). A lot of the exchange and sharing that goes on seems to be as much motivated by jealousy and envy as it is by any value of generosity or a “liberal custom of sharing.” In his survey of foraging societies, Kelly (1995:164-65) notes that “Sharing … strains relations between people. Consequently, many foragers try to find ways to avoid its demands … Students new to anthropology … are often disappointed to learn that these acts of sharing come no more naturally to hunter-gatherers than to members of industrial societies.”" https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
• ACCount37 10mo ago
  No. Nature isn't your friend, and evolution doesn't optimize for happiness. The sliver lining is: you'll suffer in an entirely different way! Buuut you can do that in the modern world too. Just go homeless.
• pfannkuchen 10mo ago
  Staying hunter gatherer isn’t sustainable unless everyone does it, because of the larger population size enabled by agriculture. Larger groups can generally dominate smaller groups absent a technological difference, but here again agriculture has an advantage because it at least seems like it’s easier to develop technology when your stuff isn’t getting moved around all the time.