[culi]

We actually have a ton of evidence refuting this. The two things anthropologists spend their whole time rejecting in popular sciences is the barter myth and the idea that hunter-gatherer lives are "nasty brutish and short".

The nasty brutish and short idea might have been true about many medieval European peasants but the rest of the world wasn't cramped up with livestock and poverty conditions with poor sanitation. Other people simply didn't face as much disease. There was actually some really interesting work in bioarcheology in 2018 that showed that even extremely long lifespans was not actually that rare.[0] And those who made it to adulthood could generally expect a long life (obviously tons of variation here). In the city of Cholula, Mexico, between 900 and 1531, most people who made it to adulthood lived past the age of 50.[1]

[0] https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-n...

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.22329

Not to mention the famous "Man the Hunter" symposium where Marshall Sahlins introduced the Original Affluent Society Thesis which has since been largely upheld and reinforced.