Counterpoint: beer.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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The hunter gatherer lifestyle works nicely until you get injured, have teeth problems, get sick, or get pregnant. It also helps to be male and both physically and mentally able, so if you aren't good luck with that.
As someone who's had wisdom teeth issues I'm quite happy to have modern medicine rather than being in the stone age and just having to deal with a broken tooth section rubbing against a nerve...
Dental health of hunter gathers looks like it was much better than ours:
"Hunter-gatherers had really good teeth," says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. "[But] as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change. Huge amounts of gum disease. And cavities start cropping up."
Additionally, they had better spacing due to eating tougher foods like high fiber items and tendons. So there's less dental impacting like we have with wisdom teeth.
Survivalship bias at it's finest. In literal sence of the word
Yeah things didn't really get better until Modern Dentistry so it took several thousand years to get better than hunter-gatherer level
I went to eating like the great plains American first people about 2 years ago and haven't brushed my teeth since
About three months ago I had a dentist clean the plaques off my teeth and check them, to ensure I wasn't too misguided and my teeth had no new damage
The ancient people with great teeth also had bigger heads and bigger jaws. They could fit wisdom teeth
While true, they exist today, and have a life expectancy of like 30. So mostly they just die before their teeth decay.
33% of children die by the age of 15.
There is of course merit to us having active lifestyles, controlling calorie intake, and balancing our diets, but that's in addition to the fact that we live almost 3x as long as we used to due to modern medicine, so we should continue to follow modern medicine, science, and nutrition.
Nothing in this article addressed tooth decay or dental formation issues.
Also from the article:
Hunter-gatherers who live until the age of 15 typically experience a lifespan of around 72 years. Among elderly hunter-gatherers, the incidence of diseases such as cancer and high blood pressure is very low. When recalculating the average lifespan excluding child mortality, the average lifespan for hunter-gatherers ranges from 68 to 78 years.
I also never said we shouldn't follow science or modern medicine.
Yeah, I've had enough medical issues that I'm grateful for modern medicine too. That being said, it could be conceivable to move to more of a hunter-gatherer model of living with modern necessities. It would certainly be interesting to see what that might look like on a societal scale.
Actually patriarchy only came with settling down. They actually had gender equality, which is pretty cool!
I know this is mostly a joke, but for anyone interested in this sort of thing I highly recommend you check out The Dawn of Everything, which goes into exhaustive detail about how in some places cities existed before agriculture, and in others agriculture existed for a long while without cities. (And by “check out” I mean prepare to devote long nights to reading with a million Wikipedia tabs open)
Just grabbed it from Anna's to put on my ereader thanks
I read through the summary, and it sounds a lot like how evolutionary development is perceived by the layperson vs. how complex it really is, including the deception that we are at some high point. So the next question in my mind, and based on the summary the authors left to explore as the answer is probably a difficult one to find - are there paths that could have been traveled which didn't lead to similar messes like we find ourselves in? One assumption is always that capitalism and consumption and all that comes with them is inevitable. Maybe not? It would ruin this meme that I found very fitting for society, but that's again based on an inevitable conclusion to be true.
The ancient Greeks remembered their hunter gatherer tribal ancestors as living in a golden age, when everyone was equal and the gods walked among men
The premise is that humanity has had 10,000+ years to experiment with different ways of living on all corners of the Earth, so it’s ridiculous to say that the modern system that we’ve evolved with division of labor and accumulated wealth is the only possible way (or the inevitable way) - which was kinda the premise of Sapiens. And then they back it up with a ton of modern archaeological evidence. It’s a little dry and admittedly academic, but really compelling once you dig into it.
Wow thanks for a read for next weekend
I appreciate your optimism - good luck!
Great book. Debt is also a good one by Graeber
Came to share the same text. It adds a needed level of complexity to this joke and has some incredibly eye opening connections between historical events. The world would be a better place if everyone read this book
But I like my tech. I just wish it didn't spy on me, and that we had better batteries for solar so that I can use my stuff guilt-free
It's possible to have great tech without the spying, but it takes a lot of understanding of and ability with computer technology
We have pretty good batteries. I have modelled solar on my house (based on records of the 2011 solar array I have), with 15kW of solar panels and many loads (especially HVAC, water heating, car charging) being done in daylight hours I would only need about 10kWh of battery, but 30kWh would be better for a bit of really bad weather tolerance
The main job of a battery is to provide power between dusk and dawn and to buffer power spikes (like air con starting up) from the solar power, and batteries are well up to doing that
For reference my normal night time power usage is 6kWh in winter, less when the days are longer
Lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries are safe and aren't degraded by being charged and discharged daily. Near future battery technologies are less high performing, but are non polluting
Yeah, we can have tech without single use plastics, car dependency, and neo-feudalism (late stage capitalism)
Right tech is rad, just sucks that absolute grosses of people get to decide how all of it works and what it's used for.
I don't think there is a country that doesn't spy on their citizens.
a country
Well there's your problem.
(A)
Wouldn't that be the state rather than the country? Or is that synonymous?
I guess I figured you can't really have the lines in the sand without a state making them mean something.
So yeah the distinction is worth making, and stateless is the end goal, but I reached for the bit 😁
On the bright side: the internets, videogames, plumbing and hot baths
Touching a control for enough heat to cook dinner versus setting a fire
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