Let's compare human happiness of hunter gatherers VS modern people

odyssey06 · 12-06-2018 10:41PM

Naos wrote: »

The book Sapiens has a good spin on this.
Farming enslaved us.
Before farming, humans were free to roam the lands and they survived. Once we started farming, we were locked down to the land - having to work it night & day in order to survive. Families had more children because they could sustain them due to increase crop yields, but this only increased food demands which meant people had to work harder & longer.
Etc. etc.

I would not go so for as enslaved. But it is a trap of sorts. If you adopt it to get through lean hunting years, in the early generations land is abundant. Numbers go up. Down the line land gets scarcer but there is no way to go back, the old lifestyle could only support a fraction of the people.

Hunter gatherers can move on in the face of a natural disaster. Agricultural society is in big trouble if its land is destroyed.

odyssey06 · 12-06-2018 10:42PM

Arghus wrote: »

I'll take my modern day ennui over women commonly dying in childbirth, people being sacrificed to appease the Gods and a life expectancy of 30, if you were doing real well.

All those things happened in agricultural socieities pre the modern era though... it took us a long time to get to a place where modern life trumped that natural state in relation to all of the above.

12-06-2018 11:34PM

the_syco wrote: »

They'd be dead.

Actually when you think about it there probably wouldn't need to be any vegans as the old hunter gatherer lifestyle would remove most of the common reasons for people becoming vegan in the first place

Twenty Grand · 12-06-2018 11:55PM

Naos wrote: »

The book Sapiens has a good spin on this.

Farming enslaved us.

Before farming, humans were free to roam the lands and they survived. Once we started farming, we were locked down to the land - having to work it night & day in order to survive. Families had more children because they could sustain them due to increase crop yields, but this only increased food demands which meant people had to work harder & longer.

Disease developed due to large numbers of people living in close proximity to one another.

Etc. etc.

I would completely disagree with this. Living off the land doesn't preclude hunting and gathering. It just ensures you have a more stable food source.

You don't have to work land night and day. Once you plough and sow, there's little work to do until harvest (unless you're working a Paddy field) Large families probably happened anyways, it's not like they had contraception. Infant mortality just decreased as people had more time and resources to rear children.
We have much better immune systems as a result of these diseases, and of course now as an advanced society there's almost zero chance of a large scale epidemic.
I fail to see how hunting and gathering is better than farming unless you're looking at it through rose tinted glasses and not freezing your nuts off in the snow while your family are dying from exposure around you.

Beasty · 12-06-2018 11:59PM

badabing106 wrote: »

Humans are physically designed to move, hunt and gather. They were designed to live in communal tribes where everything was shared, even the raring of other people's children

There was no anxiety over property, or money. They shared the physical exiliration of hunting together, the communal joy of providing and sharing food which was either hunted or gathered. The lived continously in the now and in one with nature. They were physically in the peak condition they were designed to be in. Ten times more capable and resilient than modern folk

They had everything that they needed to be content, food, shelter, sexy relations in abundance, sleep, community

The most popular sports today are hunting and gathering a ball, it's in our DNA, like it or not

We are hunter gatherers. We are not happy in modern times. Get on a bus or a train and you will only see sad faces

However we were "designed" we've continued to evolve - some of us more than others! Our ancestors were hunter/gatherers as there was nowhere for them to buy their vegan burgers and chips (and indeed no money to buy with - probably resulting in wars/fights to gain land from which they could hunt and gather)

I may not be as resilient as my ancestors, but I've probably already lived longer than most of them did

I don't get on busses or trains, so you're not going to see my happy face on either....

KungPao · 13-06-2018 12:35AM

Sure if I lived back then I’d be eaten by a T Rex or a raptor, And have no World Cup to look forward to.

I’d say they had great barbecues though.

Arghus · 13-06-2018 12:41AM

odyssey06 wrote: »

All those things happened in agricultural socieities pre the modern era though... it took us a long time to get to a place where modern life trumped that natural state in relation to all of the above.

So far you're making modern life sound great.

fash · 13-06-2018 05:18AM

http://wereallrelative.com/2014/04/05/the-puzzling-white-indians-who-loved-their-abductors/

There was almost only a one way stream of people who preferred to remain to remain with native American hunter gatherer societies rather than western agricultural societies in colonial times.

Agriculture for most of history was a horrible existence- but a "tragedy of the commons" type situation as it could support more people ( in much poorer conditions) than hunting/gathering.

Ipso · 13-06-2018 05:51AM

Haven’t read it but this book makes the claim that agriculture was detrimental for humans.
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-Agriculture-Hijacked-Civilization/dp/0865477132

odyssey06 · 13-06-2018 08:44AM

Twenty Grand wrote: »

I would completely disagree with this. Living off the land doesn't preclude hunting and gathering. It just ensures you have a more stable food source.

You don't have to work land night and day. Once you plough and sow, there's little work to do until harvest (unless you're working a Paddy field) Large families probably happened anyways, it's not like they had contraception. Infant mortality just decreased as people had more time and resources to rear children.
We have much better immune systems as a result of these diseases, and of course now as an advanced society there's almost zero chance of a large scale epidemic.
I fail to see how hunting and gathering is better than farming unless you're looking at it through rose tinted glasses and not freezing your nuts off in the snow while your family are dying from exposure around you.

We only needed those immune systems because of the epidemics that started with domesticated animals. And hundreds of millions of people died from those diseases. We are the descendants of the lucky ones whose genes and immune systems offered natural protection.

For every hunter gatherer that died in the snow, or fell victim to a predator, or starvation, there were a thousand times more dead people from epidemics. And famines hit agricultural societies too. Not sure why you think hunter gatherers across the globe would have had higher risk of death from exposure than say, the early farmers getting through northern european winters.

Dohnjoe · 13-06-2018 09:27AM

badabing106 wrote: »

Humans are physically designed to move, hunt and gather. They were designed to live in communal tribes where everything was shared, even the raring of other people's children

There was no anxiety over property, or money. They shared the physical exiliration of hunting together, the communal joy of providing and sharing food which was either hunted or gathered. The lived continously in the now and in one with nature. They were physically in the peak condition they were designed to be in. Ten times more capable and resilient than modern folk

They had everything that they needed to be content, food, shelter, sexy relations in abundance, sleep, community

The most popular sports today are hunting and gathering a ball, it's in our DNA, like it or not

We are hunter gatherers. We are not happy in modern times. Get on a bus or a train and you will only see sad faces

There are still hunter-gatherer societies remaining in various remote parts of the world. Not by choice. It's a tough, brutal life. It's an option I wouldn't take, am happy enough in my modern life, thanks

valoren · 13-06-2018 10:03AM

Way back in the Savannah completing the daily equivalent of a marathon distance, using a combination of trotting, walking, jogging, sprinting was nothing special. It was a necessity even for the eldest humans. That endurance was also coupled with the capacity to go days without food. Our bodies are covered with fat to allow for that. Even the leanest elite athlete has enough stored fat to do complete hundreds of miles on water alone. So covering huge distances on limited energy intake allowed humans to endure. Now there had to be something, a reward, for doing this and the concept of the runners high becomes relevant. Your brain gave you, through a rush of dopamine and endorphins, a sense of well being, euphoria and 'happiness'. It was an adaptation in the brain which gave motivation for having to exert.

Today we have access to energy on tap. We have no need to fast or endure. Our happy chemicals are derived from drugs of all kinds, our dopamine hit from technology, computer games, facebook etc. We eat too much sugar, processed 'food' and wonder why we get sick.

Today you hear people saying they can't even climb two flights of stairs without being out of breath, never mind doing something like a 5k. The horror of it. They gasp upon learning about ultra marathons, ironman triathlons and 'extreme' stories of human endurance. They have gone from becoming the norm to becoming outliers, the practitioners of these events regarded as freaks of nature. The question becomes why? Why do that? Because we can. Because we did.

Some try it out, using the bull**** notion of "no pain, no gain/go hard or go home" approach, they get injured, hurt, they under perform and just say **** it. You see overweight runners, with expressions of sheer pain on their face, fit but unhealthy and stressed instead of using their brains and using common sense to getting fitter one day at a time. Instead, we want instant gratification and get fed up and hurt.

In terms of possessions, it was a case of less is more. Less to lug around, it made sense to have the bare necessities.

The ultimate goal ought to be taking the wired endurance of primitive humans and trying in as far as possible coupling it with modern amenities in lifestyle and medicine to extend our life span. After all now that the risk of getting mauled by a saber tooth tiger is minuscule, that viruses and infections are being curtailed, living for as long as possible is the name of the game.

wakka12 · 13-06-2018 10:32AM

No anxiety? Im sure the annual coming of sub zero winter temperatures was quite anxiety inducing, the fact you never knew where your next meal would come from, the fact you'd die if you got sick. All seems a bit more worrisome than our exams or taxes or physical appearance or whatever itty bitty thing we worry about

I think you're over romanticising their life, society has overwhelmingly changed for the better!

topper75 · 13-06-2018 11:07AM

I wouldn't say it was idyllic, but yes it was better than today on the whole.

It is dependent and two things though - low population, high resources - both essential for it to work.

Ireland would have been a paradise in this regard circa 7000 BC. Rivers and lakes pristine and full of fish, dense woodlands pulsing with game.

Two good books I enjoyed in this area were:
-Don't Sleep There are Snakes (Amazon tribe, contacted but reject modernity)
-Affluence Without Abundance (study of the Bushmen of southern Africa)

Change is a double-edged sword and we are not going back. So I say - if you must suffer the downsides of our age, make sure you reap whatever benefit is on offer.

Billy86 · 13-06-2018 11:08AM

gw80 wrote: »

But i would agree modern technology is making us useless as a species as we get more and more technology to do things for us.

I would disagree - those machines give us more uses if anything.

I read recently about a test on a crow (or pigeon? Can't remember) where they wanted to see how it was at using tools. The food was out of reach, but the bird had the intelligence to use a stick given to it, to unlock a larger stick, which in turn was able to reach the food and get it down to them. It was seem as a pretty remarkable test as were the results - a bird able to use a stick and to think far ahead to use that stick to get another one, which would help it achieve its goal.

Would flying to the food have made the bird more useful? Was making our sticks pointer and sturdier back when we were cavemen making us less useful as a species, or more?

Tools and machines might make us less physically capable than those before us, but as a whole it has made us far more useful overall. Christ, we're bordering in playing God at this point in many aspects of the science industry.

Dohnjoe · 13-06-2018 11:12AM

valoren wrote: »

Way back in the Savannah completing the daily equivalent of a marathon distance, using a combination of trotting, walking, jogging, sprinting was nothing special. It was a necessity even for the eldest humans. That endurance was also coupled with the capacity to go days without food. Our bodies are covered with fat to allow for that. Even the leanest elite athlete has enough stored fat to do complete hundreds of miles on water alone. So covering huge distances on limited energy intake allowed humans to endure. Now there had to be something, a reward, for doing this and the concept of the runners high becomes relevant. Your brain gave you, through a rush of dopamine and endorphins, a sense of well being, euphoria and 'happiness'. It was an adaptation in the brain which gave motivation for having to exert.

Today we have access to energy on tap. We have no need to fast or endure. Our happy chemicals are derived from drugs of all kinds, our dopamine hit from technology, computer games, facebook etc. We eat too much sugar, processed 'food' and wonder why we get sick.

Today you hear people saying they can't even climb two flights of stairs without being out of breath, never mind doing something like a 5k. The horror of it. They gasp upon learning about ultra marathons, ironman triathlons and 'extreme' stories of human endurance. They have gone from becoming the norm to becoming outliers, the practitioners of these events regarded as freaks of nature. The question becomes why? Why do that? Because we can. Because we did.

Some try it out, using the bull**** notion of "no pain, no gain/go hard or go home" approach, they get injured, hurt, they under perform and just say **** it. You see overweight runners, with expressions of sheer pain on their face, fit but unhealthy and stressed instead of using their brains and using common sense to getting fitter one day at a time. Instead, we want instant gratification and get fed up and hurt.

In terms of possessions, it was a case of less is more. Less to lug around, it made sense to have the bare necessities.

The ultimate goal ought to be taking the wired endurance of primitive humans and trying in as far as possible coupling it with modern amenities in lifestyle and medicine to extend our life span. After all now that the risk of getting mauled by a saber tooth tiger is minuscule, that viruses and infections are being curtailed, living for as long as possible is the name of the game.

As another poster pointed out, you are romanticizing, as well as a fair dose of generalisation, rose-coloured glasses and so on

If you are so keen on your notion, you are free to go to S America or Africa and give this lifestyle a shot - I know a handful of people who have. Unsurprisingly they all returned.

13-06-2018 11:56AM

_Brian wrote: »

Think they had a life Expectancy of about 25-28, probably die horrific painful death from some sort of infection from a thorn or mauled by a wolf.

Modern life expectancy must be 75, in general we suffer very little, very few of us get eaten when on our daily commute and if you ignore the moaning pansies we have quite a cushie lifestyle.

This is misleading. There was a very high infant mortality rate. Once you reached adulthood, you were likely to live just as long.

Zubeneschamali · 13-06-2018 11:59AM

badabing106 wrote: »

We are hunter gatherers. We are not happy in modern times.

I remember reading an anthropologist saying that we should not rely entirely on studying a stone age tribe in New Guinea to try and understand human nature - there may be important reasons why these guys are still in the Stone Age and we are not.

valoren · 13-06-2018 12:00PM

Dohnjoe wrote: »

As another poster pointed out, you are romanticizing, as well as a fair dose of generalisation, rose-coloured glasses and so on

If you are so keen on your notion, you are free to go to S America or Africa and give this lifestyle a shot - I know a handful of people who have. Unsurprisingly they all returned.

Give the lifestyle a shot? What lifestyle? Running around in a leotard and a spear and foregoing food for days? What would that prove?

I eat as much real food as I can, which is hard and expensive. I train aerobically to maintain fitness and I try to maintain a lean body weight. I figure the less I have to carry around, the less strain there will be on my ticker. I also indulge in crap food and I can be a lazy ****er but my point is that we have access to and knowledge of the best in medical science and treatments but the irony is that we're mostly sick and injured. We no longer have to endure physically and maybe perhaps we're sick, injured, tired and stressed because of that.

Wibbs · 13-06-2018 12:00PM

Arghus wrote: »

a life expectancy of 30, if you were doing real well.

Nope, that's a fallacy. What skewed the figures was the pretty appalling childhood mortality rate(though industrial revolution age Europe was the same or higher and overall mortality rates in post medieval Europe were even worse than in HG's). However if a hunter gatherer got to adulthood the chances of him or her getting to 60, even 70 was not very different to our own chances. Medical science and clean water has massively decreased the number of kids dying and has massively increased the number of 80+ year olds.

Are HG's fitter on average than modern western society peoples? Yeah, that's a near given. Their diets are more varied, their level of physical exercise is much higher and their mental health is more stable. They also have more "leisure time" contrary to popular belief. They spend less time gathering resources. Moving to farming increased our workload, though it massively increased our technological and philosophical progress.

Farming requires more longterm planning. It requires altering the landscape. It requires boundaries and boundary walls and ditches, which gives us building and measurements. Surplus food requires storage, which gives us storage vessels, pottery and stouter buildings. It requires larger societal organisation and it requires proof of ownership of surplus food, which gives us writing and accounting. Larger groups of humans and trade routes we already had in pre farming cultures and we had art. It seems these were our "killer apps", though the leap in population that came with farming really mashed the throttle to the floor.

When you look at the pre agricultural "Stone Age" of modern human hunter gatherers while there are broadly regional differences, what jumps out is tens of thousands of years of art, culture and tech that barely changes. The cave art of 15,000 years ago was almost identical in motifs to the cave art of 40,000 years ago. Though interestingly the very earliest cave art is the better quality and better executed. You'd expect the opposite*. So people with the same bodies(roughly) and minds as us lived lives of little change over many many generations. There was no sense of time the way we look at it. The past was the same as the present and the future looked likely to be too. A hard concept for us modern folks to get our head around.

*one theory holds that these earlier modern humans might have been on average more intelligent than peoples today. The theory goes that they had to be. They weren't just a jack of all trades, they had to be masters of all trades in order to survive. Every man and woman had to know all that was required to know to live in the environment. There may have been some specialisation; artists. People who were given time off from hunting and gathering to create paintings and sculptures. Experiments have shown that carving something like a Venus statue in mammoth ivory with flint tools took many thousands of hours of work. Against that is that in the early days they decorated everything they could. It's a very rare spear thrower or wood or bone tool that wasn't decorated by the owner, often lavishly.

sbsquarepants · 13-06-2018 12:09PM

It's all bolloxology OP - nobody was happier living from day to day in a fúcking freezing cold hut, living in a 5 mile radius of where you were born, dying at 30, and possibly starving to death if they broke their ankle, or had bad eyesight!

I got my eyes lasered to help me hunt and gather in a German supermarket, then I bring I my spoils home in my French car and cook it on my Chinese barbeque while drinking Czech beer. Then I watch some American shows on my Korean tv and ride my Egyptian girlfriend and off to sleep with me. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I'll take my life of toil and worry over any cavemans life of leisure.

odyssey06 · 13-06-2018 12:25PM

sbsquarepants wrote: »

It's all bolloxology OP - nobody was happier living from day to day in a fúcking freezing cold hut, living in a 5 mile radius of where you were born, dying at 30, and possibly starving to death if they broke their ankle, or had bad eyesight!

I don't know where you are getting these ideas.

Hunter gatherers had fire and animal hides, there is nothing to suggest they spent their time shivering. They were far more mobile than agricultural populations who were tied to the land. There were a lot of people in Ireland in the early part of this century who didn't go further than 5 miles.

sbsquarepants · 13-06-2018 12:30PM

odyssey06 wrote: »

I don't know where you are getting these ideas.

Hunter gatherers had fire and animal hides, there is nothing to suggest they spent their time shivering. They were far more mobile than agricultural populations who were tied to the land. There were a lot of people in Ireland in the early part of this century who didn't go further than 5 miles.

I have goretex and central heating and I spend half the time shivering!

Dohnjoe · 13-06-2018 12:34PM

valoren wrote: »

I also indulge in crap food and I can be a lazy ****er but my point is that we have access to and knowledge of the best in medical science and treatments but the irony is that we're mostly sick and injured. We no longer have to endure physically and maybe perhaps we're sick, injured, tired and stressed because of that.

We have modern hunter-gatherer (remote) societies, putting aside infant mortality, some groups actually come close to "Western" average life expectancy, some fall quite short

So their life expectancy is generally less (with infant mortality, a lot less)

It's a generalisation to say we are "mostly sick and injured". Things like obesity, lack of exercise, bad diet can lead to health issues - but these are related to life choices, not a forced situation

The One Doctor · 13-06-2018 12:38PM

badabing106 wrote: »

Humans are physically designed to move, hunt and gather. They were designed to live in communal tribes where everything was shared, even the raring of other people's children

There was no anxiety over property, or money. They shared the physical exiliration of hunting together, the communal joy of providing and sharing food which was either hunted or gathered. The lived continously in the now and in one with nature. They were physically in the peak condition they were designed to be in. Ten times more capable and resilient than modern folk

They had everything that they needed to be content, food, shelter, sexy relations in abundance, sleep, community

The most popular sports today are hunting and gathering a ball, it's in our DNA, like it or not

We are hunter gatherers. We are not happy in modern times. Get on a bus or a train and you will only see sad faces

I see. So what happened when our hunter gatherer brethren had any of the following problems?

Gallstones
Sepsis
Abcesses
Hernias
Toothache
Asthma
Heart defects
Broken limbs
Breech birth
Placental abruption

I could go on and on. The result, in case you didn't know, would be painful death or disability in every case. The average life expectancy of a hunter gatherer was 25-30 years.

Oh yes, and don't forget the shattering blow of a child dying at birth or very young would be a constant and real threat for any hunter gatherer parent.

TLDR: You are talking out of your rectum.

13-06-2018 12:39PM

You should read the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari or Tribe by Sebastian Junger if this interests you. We are probably happier people in hunter gatherer societies. We were not built for this individualist each-to-their-own way of living. Even the family unit is arguably broken. We could be raised by the group rather than two parents.

Zubeneschamali · 13-06-2018 12:43PM

There are also disagreements about how peaceful hunter-gatherer life was.

Most modern hunter gatherers are in a constant state of tribal warfare with a significant death rate form fighting other tribes.

odyssey06 · 13-06-2018 01:17PM

sbsquarepants wrote: »

I have goretex and central heating and I spend half the time shivering!

Yes but you are puny modern human like rest of us

J Mysterio · 13-06-2018 01:18PM

Twenty Grand wrote: »

I would completely disagree with this. Living off the land doesn't preclude hunting and gathering. It just ensures you have a more stable food source.

You don't have to work land night and day. Once you plough and sow, there's little work to do until harvest (unless you're working a Paddy field) Large families probably happened anyways, it's not like they had contraception. Infant mortality just decreased as people had more time and resources to rear children.
We have much better immune systems as a result of these diseases, and of course now as an advanced society there's almost zero chance of a large scale epidemic.
I fail to see how hunting and gathering is better than farming unless you're looking at it through rose tinted glasses and not freezing your nuts off in the snow while your family are dying from exposure around you.

That's not so. Antibiotics are beginning to fail as viruses etc. adapt to them. We are very susceptible to a pandemic, all the more so due to the globalised, connected world, which could spread disease quickly through air travel.

Zubeneschamali · 13-06-2018 01:23PM

J Mysterio wrote: »

That's not so. Antibiotics are beginning to fail as viruses etc. adapt to them..

Oh no! Antibiotic resistant viruses!!

Let's compare human happiness of hunter gatherers VS modern people

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