Were we happiest when we were hunter gatherers?

Candie wrote: »

You forget that we weren't sitting pretty at the top of the food chain and life was more often than not fraught with insecurity and hardship. We were pretty lowly animals in a landscape of much more deadly and plentiful predators.

Actually we weren't and hadn't been for quite a while and for quite a few previous species of humans. We were very much top of the food chain, apex predators. While previous species of humans had been apex predators, they had remained in a stable predator prey balance, we Homo Sapiens Sapiens really ramped that up. You can track our movements out of Africa from the mass extinctions of large prey animals(and competing predators) in our wake. Even into historical times we can observe this. QV New Zealand, one of the last large land areas we got to. The Maori arrived in around the eleventh century and within a couple of hundred years had decimated the local fauna.

It also depends on which "hunter gatherers" one looks at. It was far harder to eke out a living in Ice Age Europe than in interglacial Europe, harder in inland areas than coastlines. The umbrella term covers many environments and cultures and level of sophistication of same.

Arthur Daley wrote:

Where people really meat eaters for much of that time? We don't have the teeth and digestive systems of true carnivores.

Actually our teeth aren't too bad at processing meat, they're certainly not the teeth of true herbivores. Ditto for our digestive systems. We can't process cellulose like herbivores for a start.

Then you have the need for fire to cook the meat, which obviously no other meat eater requires.

Cooking was an adaptation that pre digested meat(not unlike how predator parents eat meat then regurgitate it for their young). BTW it also helps pre digest veggies to release far more nutrients than the raw form. Few enough of our regular veggies could we eat in the raw form. A few would be poisonous to do so. We didn't wait around to evolve sharper teeth or stronger stomach acid, we made sharp tools and fire to do that for us. Alone among animals we externalised and directed our own evolution.

We're the ultimate omnivores. We can survive and thrive on any number of diets you care to consider. We've been like that for a long time too. EG Neandertals are usually painted as the ultimate meat eaters but the more we learn the more we find they also varied depending on where and when they were from. Some groups had the diet profile of wolves and lions, others were far more veggie based and rarely ate meat. The earliest so far found human use of cooked grains was found in them. It seems they made biscuits. Whether they dunked is still up for debate...

As for which was the better lifestyle? Physically, yes HG's were stronger and fitter, more robust and overall healthier. However there's a strong element of survivor bias to that. They lost an appalling percentage of their children, so if you made it to adulthood you were already preselected to be stronger and healthier. The sickly kids simply died. This also happened in agri societies of course, but they could have more kids overall and slightly fewer of the sickly kids died. Even a century ago the average family of say four or five kids could "expect" to lose one. I've never been hospitalised, never had an antibiotic and need no regular meds, but I would be a tiny minority who could claim that today. We're so much better off today.

Mentally? Primitive societies seem to fare much better in that regard alright and not just HG's, small scale primitive agricultural societies show similar. While they suffer tragedies, they also have more community support(HS's are almost never alone), more predictable and stable lives within a cohesive culture. We live rapidly changing lives of much more uncertainty, with smaller psychological insults, but far more of them. Even compared to our grandparents.

We could I suppose try to combine some of the good parts into our lives. Physical exercise for example. The average day for a HG was a low level crossfit session. Their diets were more varied too. Though the "Paleo diet" is too much like Bro Science™. It's far better than chucking Maccie Dees down you, but it's nothing like the diets we ate back then. Pretty much every vegetable and the majority of fruit you get today simply didn't exist in the wild in those forms. The bulk of veggies they ate were usually of the root variety as little of the leafy stuff above ground was edible.