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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 o
by manmal 11mo 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 11mo agoinsects, 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 11mo agoI‘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 11mo agoWe 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.
- sarchertech 11mo ago>Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world. There’s plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt, water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it’s not very hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit in the wild. >factory farms Didn’t need factory farms for smallpox. Many animals live in large herds, which were larger in the past. If you read accounts from the 18th and early 19th century there are many reports of squirrel migrations involving hundreds of millions of squirrels in relatively small areas.
- manmal 11mo agoSmall pox was way after hunter gatherer times, so I‘m not sure what point you are making. Huge farms were a thing even in medieval times, with hundreds of animals.
- 9rx 11mo ago"Way after" is quite an overstatement. Smallpox is as old as agriculture. Most seem to agree that it was the transition into agrarian life that provided the necessary conditions for it to emerge, but it did so right as that transition took place.
- sarchertech 11mo agoMy point is that factory farms aren’t a requirement for zoonotic viruses. Smallpox also predates the medieval period by thousands of years. We also know that there are viral epidemics in animals that live in solitary animals and animals that live in groups smaller than the size of hunter gatherer tribes.
- palmotea 11mo ago> There’s plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt, water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it’s not very hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit in the wild. An hunter-gathers were probably a lot more robust to that than modern people. Think about it: if what you say were that big of an issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out before getting to us.
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- scott_w 11mo agoParent specifically called out antibiotics, which are for bacterial infections, not diseases. Coupled with the increased number of things to step on or get cut by means you really need them.
- manmal 11mo agoYou definitely don't automatically need antibiotics for something you step on, or get cut. Any topical antiseptic will do, and probably perform better.
- scott_w 11mo agoWhat you say is only half true. I’m also thinking of injuries caused by animals and other people. Antiseptic isn’t going to fix the nasty kind of infections deep bite or knife wounds cause. A hunter gatherer society is definitely at greater risk of suffering these kinds of injuries than we are. And also, even antiseptic treatment was in shorter supply than it is today, so it’s still a moot point.
- manmal 11mo agoThere's sufficient evidence that hunter gatherer societies have indeed used various plant- and animal based antiseptics (honey, oils, tannins, resins, fungi,...) to treat wounds.
- scott_w 11mo agoI said shorter supply than today, not totally unavailable. Pre-agrarian societies, by definition, were not growing and harvesting antiseptics in bulk. They’d not do much against an infection from a stab wound (yes, non-agrarian societies encountered, fought and killed each other).
- Qwertious 11mo ago>Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world Traded neolithic goods regularly crossed continents. If an axe head can cross the continent then so can a microscopic disease.
- dboreham 11mo agoDisease can also be zoonotic. E.g. North America supposedly saw disease spread by wild pigs through the indigenous population before direct contact with colonizing Europeans.