Hacker News Reader

Comment by yesiamyourdad | Hacker News Reader

Well, if you're starving, you'll try anything. If you survive, hey, that worked, let's do it again!

People seem to lose sight of that fact: when you're faced with death, you'll try anything.

And we keep forgetting just how common starving to death must have been in prehistoric tribes..

Is that true or an assumption we make? How do we know for sure that this was the case for prehistoric tribes? I mean, most habitats aside from the desert are teeming with edible items.

There was this documentary about a first contact with an amazon tribe. I remember an interview with the (very young) leader of the tribe who was talking about how life was in the jungle and iirc he described it as very miserable, they wouldn't eat for days at a time, bugs everywhere ++

it's the documentary talked about here, I highly recommend it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/amazon-tribe-m...

Yes, but you have to put this in historical context. These modern tribes have been pushed into corners by the industrialized nations all around them.

Modern hunter-gatherers do not necessarily equal ancient ones.

Good point!

Most habitats indeed are full of living organisms compatible with human dietary needs. The problem is, sometimes you're so good at killing that you just kill all the food before the food has time to reproduce itself. Or maybe it just doesn't rain for two months. Or myriad other contingencies that make nomadic life precarious.

edit: and as bad_user pointed out, thats a huuuge reason itself to even be nomadic

For example, you become injured or sick and all of a sudden you can't catch those edible items.

If it was a temporary injury, you could rely on your family.

Our ancestors were way more in tune with their surroundings, and knew how to moderate their consumption so as not to decimate their food supply populations. We have evidence from many Native American tribes.

Just because modern, industrialized humans are out of touch with natural limits doesn’t mean we were always like this.

You might be interested in Jared Diamonds "Collapse". He's aggregated a lot of evidence of many societies that over populated, over consumed and died out. Not all did though and your technically right in that the survivors (our ancestors) avoided this fate. I just think we should be weary about any claims that peoples of the past were any smarter about their self preservation than we are..

Fair enough, I'll check out the book.

I'm not trying to argue that ancestors were smarter.

For our own political purposes, it's probably best if the narrative becomes "all of our ancestor societies binged themselves to collapse, so we need to be very careful about our own habits" although it's not exactly true that all groups did that.

Wfor political purposes this doesn't matter...

Ancient civilizations rarely had a clue of how a desert came to be. Certainly, we today understand the environmental impact we have.

Furthermore, we posses many tools to combat the problem: resource taxation; development of sustainable technology; reduction of waste and consumption.

North and South America were teeming with large mammals before humans came to this hemisphere 10-20kya. Saber-tooth cats, horses, ground sloths, enormous camels, mammoths, mastodons, ....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_animals...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_American_animals...

Today we have an unfortunate tendency to romantize native peoples as living in harmony with each other and/or nature.

But in fact few things in nature lives in harmony. If there is a balance it's usually kept through violent death or starvation.

Humans are also exceptionally good at storing fat while also saving energy the moment someone misses a meal. There is a lot of research indicating regular fasting is actually beneficial to ones health, which in context would seem to only make sense if we were adapted to regularly encounter times of poor food availability. With people relying on stored fat from gorging on foods from better times and what you could find while traveling instead of dedicated forging or hunting. Once you encounter a better area with more game and natural food sources you stop again for a little while.

Why? Animals don't usually starve to death. Nor do humans. Any generation has an established means of extracting what it needs from its environment. Starvation is an exceptional occurrence.

If the tribe gets too big, it can quickly deplete the resources in the area, especially when helped by natural phenomena like drought.

N.B. animals have evolved in harmony with their environment. In general you get the perfect ratio of predators to herbivores to plants. If there are too many herbivores in an area and without natural enemies, that can quickly turn the environment to a deserted land. There are actually stories around like how introducing wolves in the Yellow Stone national park has saved its rivers.

Humans on the other hand are too adaptable for the environment. We can live in any environment and without natural enemies to keep our population in check, nature’s laws don’t apply to us.

So could we deplete our resources 15,000 years ago? Hell yeah. In fact that’s the number one reason for the migrations of early humans between continents.

Preditors prey relationships are far from perfect. What's missed is locally things can get out of whack, but both preditors and prey move around. Further the vast majority of species have died out, and that trend shows no sign of stopping.

>In general you get the perfect ratio of predators to herbivores to plants.

This is just flat out wrong. Both predator and prey animals starve to death all the time, often due to the impact they have on their environment but also due to a myriad other natural events. It's known as the predator-prey cycle and is a series of population booms and busts caused by over consumption and over population. Here's a video that gives a very basic explanation.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/high-school-biology/hs-e...

My folks live out in the middle of the woods, and my dad has several times observed that there will be a bunch of rabbits and not very many coyotes running around for a year or two, then there will be a lot of coyotes and not very many rabbits for a year or two, then there will be a bunch of rabbits and not very many coyotes again.

Territorial animals often starve to death when the prey migrates to a new pasture.

Animals don't usually starve to death because once they get weakened by starvation there are plenty of things on Nature that will kill them faster.

But one does not need to be near death to start fighting starvation with all his might.

That's pretty recent, actually. According to the UN, in 1947 the global rate of undernourishment (a year or more of insufficient food) was approximately 50%. In 1975 the rate was 35% in the developing world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Famine has always been with us, at least until the last decade or so. Until very recently, a single crop failure could devastate a community. Huge swaths of the world were vulnerable to famines. Have a look at the mortality from famines by decade since the 19th century, from the Our World In Data project: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Famine... , or the chart of famine deaths and durations from the same: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/The-nu... . And this starts in a relatively modern timeframe. There's a good reason that famine was included as a horseman of the apocalypse, along with war, pestilence, and death. It is only recently that famine has been reduced to an exceptional occurrence. In previous generations, undernourishment was the norm, and famine not uncommon.

We forget how common starving to death was before very modern times.

I question this idea. It seems like “common wisdom” that hunter-gatherers had “nasty, brutish, and short” lives but the author of Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind argues that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were the “original affluent society.” They probably spent much less overall time on food than our agricultural ancestors. The H-Fs would spend 4-6 hours foraging, trapping, or hunting, and then have the rest of the day to do other stuff. They had a diverse food supply, meaning they probably got more nutrients.

Agriculturists, on the other hand, labored all day doing work that our bodies weren’t evolved for. They depended on a single crop. If anything went wrong with that crop, famine for many people was certain. And since they had less food diversity, they were comparatively malnourished.

Stephen Pinker often talks about life in present day Papau New Guinea where tribal societies exist that are likely very similar to those that existed in all hunter-gatherer societies. Life mostly sucks and if you meet someone in a different tribe you spend most of your time deciding whether or not to kill that person.

Yuval Harari [1] argues that the violence in New Guinea is an example of a "simple agricultural society with no political framework beyond village and tribe."

In other words, yes, New Guinea is violent, but it doesn't represent a hunter-forager society.

[1]: Sapiens, p. 82

Reply on news.ycombinator.com