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Silence8 -> RE: Doomsayers (6/17/2010 8:45:42 PM)
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ORIGINAL: vincentML
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This whole 30-year-life-span idea relates to the agricultural revolution, not the millions of years before it when people had better diets.
Astonishing statement, S8. The current interglacial period began about 12,000 years ago and led to the advent of agriculture. So, you think Ice Age people had better diets than agricultural people? Really?
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In terms of free time -- again, yeah right. The average Native American pre-colonization worked, what, 3, 4 hours a day?
So, the indigenous people spent 20 hours a day at sleep and play? I don't think so. Bear in mind they were mostly hunter/gatherers with some patch farming and that horses were re-introduced to the western continents by the Spanish. A more likely picture is of tribes constantly moving about on foot searching for and fighting over territory productive for food.
The Pilgrims did in fact find some settled tribes east of the Appalachians but these were people who were farming, hunting, etc on foot and without plow horses. Not likely they were lying about under a tree all day reading their Kindles and grooving to their ipod tracks.
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I'm not at all convinced, by the way, that our sex is better.
I suspect many contemporary women would take issue with you on that.
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Yes, yes, we have doctors, airplanes, etc. -- it doesn't mean we're happier. In fact, Americans, especially, don't usually rank high in terms of happiness.
Now you are changing the rules, S8. The comparison I made was 1900 vs 2000. If you start talking about Americans' happiness vs contemporaries you will have to get into that whole capitalism vs socialism debate. But really, you think people living in crowded tenements on NYC's lower east side were happy with their lot and did not miss what they never had as Termy says above? Next thing I will be reading on here is that blacks really were happier working for massa on the plantation.
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And these doctors can't even clear the simplest ailments.
The most effective doctor I've ever visited was a chiropractor.
Was he the hero we can thank for eradicating tuberculosis, thyphus, typhoid fever, cholera, diphtheria, small pox, etc? .... Puhleez!
'Millions' was meant to be hyperbolic.
This is not that controversial, I'd claim. It's almost, I'd argue, a standard among anthropologists. There was a famous paper by Marshall Sahlins in the 60s that made something along the lines of this claim, as have many since.
Again, I don't have tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever, cholera, diphtheria, small pox... what's not clear is the extent to which hunter-gatherers, or even just sustainable producers more generally, also did or did not have these diseases.
My point remains -- it's far, far from self-evident that we are somehow 'better off' individually or as a species than during prehistoric times.
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