[jarjoura]

Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive. Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.

You would never feel like you have time to just, be. Instead you're focused on getting your next meal, and finding a place to sleep.

It only took a few ice-ages to force us to get smart about how we organize and then here we are.

[chmod775]

Here's some food for thought: Something like that was their normal and they likely had all of these sorted out with relative ease, given that they'd be experts at that kind of living. Also wild food sources were plentiful. Overall they may have enjoyed more downtime than us, who have to do quite a bit to maintain our higher standards of living. Estimates are that hunter-gatherers "worked" around 20 hours / week to sustain themselves, the rest being spend on low intensity tasks or idle time.

Given how plentiful and available food sources were, I don't imagine their life could have been considered stressful in that regard. As a hunter gatherer there's also a specific point at which there's nothing really left to do: There's no point in hunting/collecting more food than you can eat before it rots. No infinite treadmill to run. Nobody who always has "more" regardless of how hard you work.

You on the other hand have a lot to stress out about in modern society, not even considering that if there's any major breakdowns in the systems we have established to feed our massive populations, such as a disease that wipes out the majority of crops, the majority of us will be dead and starved within months if not weeks, with very little individuals can do about it. The planet can always feed a couple of us, but can't feed billions if things aren't operating somewhat smoothly.

[jarjoura]

One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer. It would have been especially horrific if you broke your foot or leg and weren't able to do anything about it.

Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.

How many broken teeth did you just suffer with for the rest of your life? Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.

Mosquitos carried pathogens, the other food sources were also of random quality.

If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.

I could keep going on, but the point is, being a self-aware mammal would have been absolutely torturous.

[chmod775]

> One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer.

Yes, people back then suffered a lot of broken bones, even fractured skulls. But just like their bones tell that story, we also know that they often survived those injuries and their broken bones (and even skulls!) healed. People lived in groups and cared for injured.

Also a scratch is probably not going to kill you. It could, but likely won't.

> Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.

Going after the children of an organized group of apex predators is probably not going to end well for the attackers.

And yes, sometimes women died in childbirth, but not that often (otherwise you wouldn't be here to type that). Also there's still a decent risk of that if you live in the US.

> Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.

Extremely rare on a hunter-gatherer diet. Our ancestors lost the ability to produce their own vitamin C internally millions of years ago, because they just didn't need it. Most other mammals still can.

> Mosquitos carried pathogens

Human-adapted mosquitos hadn't evolved to the degree they have today, so bites would have been much rarer, but pathogens causing fun diseases such as malaria did already exist.

> the other food sources were also of random quality.

You mean the food sources we evolved to consume? Are you talking about parasites? Most of the nasty ones really only started becoming an issue when humans gave them breeding grounds in their settlements.

> If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.

I guess?

> I could keep going on,

Please don't. You are clearly just guessing and making stuff up as you go.

That said, of course hunter-gatherer life was much riskier than modern life, but that was just their normal. Hedonic adapation and all that.

[paulnpace]

I have wondered if animal husbandry played a larger role than agriculture, alone. The horse, as we know it, altered all of civilization.

[Melatonic]

The dog probably as well - and both horses and dogs are similar to people in that they are great at traversing long distances.

Horses also have semi similar more specialized analogues - you could argue Camels filled a similar niche for very dry areas. And other animals like Goats/Llamas/Alpacas for mountainous areas.

[komodo99]

I've always been partial to the notion that wolves domesticated human ancestors, honestly.

We like to say that dogs are wired to understand human language patterns, but who's not to say that we're not wired to emit canine 'linguistics'?

[tsoukase]

Fire, pets, electronic chips, all advanced human civilisation step by step in different stages. It's hard to estimate the relative importance of each.

Speaking so generally, the ancient Greeks noted that all these are means for achieving higher goals. How many people think about that today? Quantity is not followed by quality.

[Monotoko]

It was the cat, those little fluffy bastards walked into a human camp about 10,000 years ago and kicked everything off. That's why the Ancient Egyptians revered cats as Gods /s

[Schmerika]

Honestly not sure how necessary that /s is.

Like, without cats storing grain becomes so, so much harder; maybe basically impossible/unfeasible. Without storing grain you don't get cities as easily or as long.

Same with transporting food by boat; you gotta have a cat on your trireme or what are you even doing Andronikos.

Countless poets, writers, scientists and artists have been directly inspired by cats. I could easily believe yoga was inspired by them too.

It seems likely that models, royalty, and the concept of grace itself are all directly inspired by cats.

And then there's the profound cultural significance of Toxoplasmosis over the millenia; cats are (usually) calming; introverts can hang with cats all day...

[komodo99]

> introverts can hang with cats all day

There are certain personalities that are often attributed to modern sources, but haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte) living in a shack that has a predilection to collect herbs/mine rocks/watch the skies/you name it, that isn't thought much of or seems productive until someone gets sick/needs ore/wants to know the weather/etc?

All that said, what did crazy cat people do before cats???

[Schmerika]

> haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte)

I would bet the first human to do lots of stuff was that weird eccentric dude(tte). Who else would come up with writing, or words, or carry fire, or wear clothes, domesticate a wolf, etc.

> what did crazy cat people do before cats???

I have no idea, but that's a great question.

[allemagne]

It certainly seems probable this was the case for some groups. In general though, this just seems like a view that oversimplifies human history to critique the present rather than a detached description of what we can know.

A few things AFAIK anyone has to grant about this period:

- Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers lived all over the world, under vastly different climates, for ~100,000 years.

- These humans were anatomically modern in every sense. They had lives every bit as complex as ours.

- Human cultural, political, and social structures are and have always been inherently diverse.

- Humans have always impacted and managed their environments for better and for worse.

- The Neolithic Revolution occurred independently in multiple places over generations as a series of choices by individuals at least roughly as intelligent as we are.

- Humans who adopted agriculture came to out-populate those who didn't.

The idea that hunter-gatherers lived consistently affluent lives and enjoyed plenty of leisure time as a general rule doesn't neatly fit this picture for me. How is it more likely than the idea that these people lived basically evenly along a spectrum of fluctuating and diverse conditions, at the mercy and grace of natural systems and social trends?

Perhaps depending on the context some human groups lucked into a life of luxury, while others lived painful lives consumed by the anxiety of dwindling supplies, all as an accident of climate patterns, the spread of disease, or even human-caused overconsumption.

Even in early societies that won a Garden of Eden in the geographic lottery, what's more human than to invent new complex problems to stew over based on generational trauma, or simply wild speculation about a world we will always have limited understanding of? Perhaps some group of humans highly valued their downtime hobbies while others were obsessed with arbitrary hierarchies, wars to obtain slaves, or settling petty disputes between powerful families.

Agriculture at the very least provided predictable trade-offs that smooth out the previous extremes, and we can't know if on balance it was a strictly negative or positive change. Since then, however, I think it's safe to say that the lives of everyone I know is better off than a practitioner of early agriculture.

[nkrisc]

> Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive. Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.

If you wanted, you could ask any of the people living like that today what it’s like. You can find them even in any American city.

[Schmerika]

> Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive.

Spoken like someone who easily affords both rent and food.

> Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.

Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' - but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.

> You would never feel like you have time to just, be.

Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.

We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old. Pentatonic tuning!

[broken-kebab]

>pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling

It's more a pop culture artefact than accepted science. Original idea of paleolithic abundancy was made in sixties by rather artsy approach to the data collected in modern Kalahari. Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.

Which, taking into account that their chores were quite physically demanding, makes a less rosy picture. That's not even mentioning that however primitive were Kalahari experiences of in the middle of XX century, they are unlikely to be fully representative of paleolithic state of affairs in e.g. Northern Eurasia.

That said they probably socialized more than us for many reasons, just not instead of work.

[Schmerika]

> Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.

Well, yes, climate and ecology matter a lot. Still, I believe that figure is including things like making sure a pot doesn't boil over, ie low intensity chores; and includes 'social' tasks which look and feel very different to, say, factory work.

Still, the idea that life was "nasty brutish and short" for most of human history is thoroughly debunked. Life wasn't constant misery for everyone, despite what many people learned in school.

I think it's important that we remember what we've lost, as much as what we've gained. Whether we worked 3 hours a day or 7.5, no one (outside slavery) was working 60 hours a week and just keeping their heads above water despite thousands of years of 'progress'.

[ralferoo]

> A lot of food was more abundant

That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe organised into a group to catch anything large, but the flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering and eating what you want.

In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of time gathering food.

[mcv]

Most hunter-gatherer tribes had exactly that: time to just be. Their lives weren't governed by this rat race to always move up. Except for the harshest circumstances, they probably worked only 15 hours a week. Of course their play was partially training for that work, but I think in many ways, they lived more relaxing lives than we do.

Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the agricultural revolution. It was great for population numbers, but is increasingly seen as bad for individuals. People lived shorter lives, had shorter bodies, and were more subject to disease after the agricultural revolution.

[whymememe]

I mostly agree, but the whole worked only 15 hours a week stat is almost certainly not correct. It came from a paper that only counted time outside of camp as work, so time spent in camp processing food wasn't counted. The actual number of hours varies massively - seasonally and geographically - but probably closer to 30-40.

[prawn]

I'd bet that a lot of that in-camp work didn't feel excessively laborious when it was done while socialising within your group, and without a sense of "wish I was playing video games". Sitting around a camp fire now whittling away at something is more mucking around than chore.

[mcv]

Exactly. I don't think there really was a clear separation between work and not-work back then. It's just life. Consider wild animals: do they work?

[whymememe]

Yeah pretty much, it’s a pretty tough to pinpoint what work actually is without paid labour.

[thfuran]

Sure sitting around a campfire and whittling away at something now feels more like mucking about than chore, because it is. You don’t actually need whatever it is you’re whittling. It would probably be less relaxing if your survival depended on your handiwork.

[IAmBroom]

I have friends who handweave clothes, blacksmith tools, and of course garden for food for their families.

The stakes are lower, but not the work level required, and they all do it for funzies, essentially.

[tbirdny]

Can you imagine how many grass grazing animals would have been just standing around waiting to be eaten? During the Pleistocene, some regions supported huge, stable herds of grazing megafauna that could provide reliable food. You just needed some friends to help you hunt. In areas with relatively mild climates and predictable seasons, people likely experienced long stretches, even generations, of comparatively low stress and easy resources. Granted, life could quickly become difficult when climate, animal populations, or competition shifted.

[Saline9515]

On the upside they weren't stressed about the new "Grunt Hunt" models by Neanderthalic, which are likely take away all of the entry-level hunting jobs in the tribe.

[hax0ron3]

Yeah but eventually they were stressed by Homosapiensthalic

[solids]

Having one clear short term goal after another may sound to freedom for some people.

[seanalltogether]

I think about this a lot. How much anxiety do most people feel from the millions of options that are available to them daily, or young adults that are told they can be anything they want, but clam up and choose to do nothing instead.

[krapp]

Most people don't have millions of options available to them daily, at least not in any meaningful sense. Anxiety and choice paralysis is very much a first world privilege.

[actionfromafar]

Welcome to Gaza I guess.

[lostlogin]

I immediately thought or Iran.

It’s neat what we do to each other…