[freshhawk]

Just because this weird bit of ideology is a pet peeve of mine and it's very widespread, let's go over it one more time:

The short average life expectancy of primitive humans is entirely an artifact of high childhood mortality and how averages work. If you lived past childhood you were likely to live until your 60's or 70's.

Primitive human lives were not hard and not short, the workweek for hunter/gatherers was less than half of ours. They were strongly biased towards highly egalitarian cultures.

Doesn't mean I'd necessarily prefer that time period to now, but I'm a white guy in a rich nation with a professional career and it's still not an obvious call. For the rest of the world they wouldn't have to think about it, they would hop in that time machine and head for a pre-agricultural era in a heartbeat.

The idea that blindly sprinting in the random direction of the latest discovery and calling it "progress" has not had any downsides is stupidity, as is the willful ignorance necessary to accept a cartoon version of pre-history created in 1651 based on extrapolating from experience in London, without any evidence or knowledge.

[zild3d]

> The short average life expectancy of primitive humans is entirely an artifact of high childhood mortality

I am aware of this, but not sure why you think this negates the fact that life expectancy has increased. I would much prefer a drastically higher chance of living passed childhood. And if I somehow managed to live long enough to have children, I'd prefer that my children don't all die at birth, along with their mother. These desires have only been made possible in the last century or two

[freshhawk]

It certainly doesn't negate it, but it was an extraordinarily costly thing to buy for humanity. Other statements made it clear you didn't understand the cost. And that cost is born largely by those who's childhood mortality rates have not improved (for many they have worsened considerably).

Of course you'd prefer to have the modern first world chances of surviving childhood and childbirth. If you had a choice between prehistorical lives for your surviving children or for them all to have the lives of a random child on earth today it's a harder choice. Making your base of comparison the middle ages is also the most skewed comparison possible.

That's not even counting the fact that we are supporting this technological infrastructure not only by reducing the quality of life from less powerful peoples but by massively borrowing quality of life from all future generations.

[maxerickson]

Adult mortality was still quite a lot higher than it is today.

There have been some attempts to study hunter gatherers that existed in recent times:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/aging_evolu...

The group there isn't necessarily going to be representative, but mortality for young adults was ~2% per year. In the US it is something like 0.1%.

[anigbrowl]

Talk about missing the point. Your age at death is not a score.

[maxerickson]

I think you might be reading more than is there.