I thought this idea that humans had short lifespans historically was thoroughly debunked. Humans have historically had high infant mortality rates which threw the numbers off, but if you survived past the age of three you were pretty likely to make it to your sixties or seventies.
See "Table 6 - Period Life Tables for the Social Security Area by Calendar Year and Sex" for detailed information from the United States:
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study120.pdf
In the table series for 1900, male life expectancy at birth was 46.4 years and female life expectancy was 49 years. For the survivors of infant mortality, additional life expectancy at age 6 was 53.2 years and 54.3 years respectively. Most children could not expect to reach their 60th birthday even if they had survived infancy.
At age 18, remaining life expectancy was 41.7 and 42.9 years, for total expected age at death of 59.7 and 60.9 years respectively; weighted by sex distribution at age 18, these young adults had an average life expectancy of 60.3 years.
EDIT: This was interesting.
"Lifespans of the European Elite, 800–1800". It examines the lifespans of European aristocrats over the thousand years prior to the Industrial Revolution. It limits its analysis to people who reached at least 20 years of age. Per Figure 8, the average lifespan remained below 60 in the entire time period.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...
"Our approach is to assess and analyze available demographic data on extant hunter gatherers and forager-horticulturalists (i.e. peoples who mix hunting and gathering with swidden agriculture). In order to understand the processes that shaped the evolution of our life course, it would be useful to have data on mortality and fertility profiles across populations and over evolutionary time. Given that these data do not exist, we utilize and critically evaluate data on modern groups, as one ‘imperfect lens’ into our past." [1]
[1] Gurven, M., & Kaplan, H. (2007). Longevity among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination. Population and Development Review, 33(2), 321-365. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/25434609
Probably short. Putting aside predation, disease and starvation, there is evidence (see Pinker) that violent death was a common way to go in nomadic tribes.
This part of Harari's book have been debunked quite a few times already: his views of pre-agricultural are romanticized and doesn't match with the work of the specialists of this period. (While Harari is indeed an historian, he's a specialist of medieval times and has little authority on early-humans history).
Btw, I'm not even disagreing with you about agriculture, I just wanted to point out that quoting Harari on that has really little value.
That said, I'm no historian, just a layperson who found Harari's work (so far -- I haven't yet finished "Sapiens") thought-provoking and interesting. In the relevant early chapters his perspective is refreshingly different from the norm -- in some ways comparable (for me) to Zinn's "A People's History of the US", in that it provides a PoV sufficiently removed from the standard narrative to serve as a reminder of how shallow and incomplete any one-sided version of events must be. The GP's citing of Pinker likely belongs in this camp, too: referencing an author whose ideas have merit (eg Pinker's computational theory in "How the Mind Works"), independent of their ultimate status as authoritative works.
You might think this, but the historical pattern -- everywhere -- is that farmers stay where they are and get conquered by more mobile non-farmers. They don't so much fight as submit.
What happened was that farming was so successful that the human population boomed. When famine did occur, it caused more deaths because there were more humans.
Also it’s a bit of a trap: as soon as you switch over you cannot go back, as foraging cannot sustain as many people. You will have to constantly expand to feed the growing population.
>Since they lived in small groups and moved frequently, they had few problems with accumulating waste or contaminated water or food.
>The shift from the hunter-gather mode of living to an agricultural model provided a more secure supply of food and enabled expansion of the population. However, domesticated animals provided not only food and labor; they also carried diseases that could be transmitted to humans. People also began to rely heavily on one or two crops, so their diets were often lacking in protein, minerals, and vitamins
>Rodents and insect vectors were attracted to human settlements, providing a means of spreading disease.
Instead, here's Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers. From the 2nd ed., p. 200 on disease:
> An important cause of childhood death in many forager societies are infectious and parasitic diseases, including respiratory tuberculosis (TB), influenza, pneumonia, bronchitis, and diarrheal diseases resulting in dehydration.
> Among the Dobe Ju/’hoansi, disease, especially TB and malaria, account for 85 percent of childhood deaths ... and violence for 8 percent.
> Infectious disease (with most deaths occurring among infants and juveniles) accounts for 85–95 percent of Agta deaths
One weakness of current literature is that the mechanism by which adults get sick (contact with other adults) is radically different for living foragers than our paleolithic ancestors. With that said, the fact that we still have these epidemic diseases with us today demonstrates that they were able to survive in ancient populations (excepting plague, which is resident in marmots and only "accidentally" infectious to humans). Perhaps larger regional group sizes and a functioning long-distance forager trade network helped these diseases to survive where they struggle today, but survive they clearly did.
Why would a super healthy pre-agricultural society move to agriculture if it was doing worse than before.
Plus, the shift is going to be gradual - you start by supplementing with a small garden, a handful of captive prey animals during hard times, then after some number of generations you come to rely more and more on agriculture without necessarily realizing why or even if your tribe is showing minor signs of mysterious illness. And then if you do realize that something is up, you're probably cursing the earth/gods/demons for your illnesses, rather than coming to understand the true variety required in a healthy diet and abandoning the convenience of your farming practices, which are in no way an obvious problem.
It's a gradual process and has immediate benefits even on a small scale with relatively low investment. Consider also that women were probably not hunting, and probably had some spare time when they weren't gathering/taking care of kids or what have you. It's pretty easy for a community of Hunter gatherers to have occasional free time, if you look at data from more recent tribes from the last hundred years or so. Plus there's all kinds of art and such...simple crop rearing and basic animal raising isn't hard to imagine.
Yes, that was one of my points. The initially farmed plants were fully wild and hardy enough that they probably could be grown just by scattering seeds around.
>Farming takes a fuck ton of work. You have to water them, you have to fertilize them, you have to defend them from other animals, you have to weed out other plants competing with it for resources. It's not a simple thing. It's back breaking labor. There's a reason why 90+% of the population were farmers until the invention of gas engines, automated harvesters, electricity, etc.
Again, we're not talking modern, large scale optimized farming of GMO crops that would not survive without human care. We're talking about small, gradually expanding plots of almost wild, and therefore low maintenance, supplemental crops, that over generations become a larger and larger part of diet. How else do you think farming started?
A bison will feed a whole tribe for a month, sure, but it can also take tribe members with it, especially with your stone tipped, non compound bows. If you happen across an unusually supportive yield of whatever semi wild tubers you planted and basically forgot about, there's no reason a human wouldn't put off a dangerous hunt.
Anyway, the original question was why Hunter gatherers started farming if it were bad for them. I'm trying to show how it's possible for that to have happened. I'm not sure what you're arguing, that farming could not have occurred in any beneficial capacity before combines? Have you ever had a vegetable garden? Hardly backbreaking work if you're lucky enough to have good soil and the right climate for whatever you're growing...
Again, this is a gradual process. Hell, I can think of a modern analogue that I've picked myself, the blue Camas plant that grows all over the PNW in patches. It doesn't take much work once you've figured out you can plant them yourself next to your cave/camp.
Even just 3-6 adult human men with spears is a force to be reckoned with in the animal kingdom. They're capable of strategizing, trapping, corralling, etc. Also, animals weren't just used for food in the stone age, the bones were used for structures, tools, etc. The leather was used for clothing, warmth, huts, etc. Humans certainly continued to hunt in the early days of agriculture.
It probably was the case that other humans less capable of hunting due to higher risk and lower strength (elderly, women, children, injured, etc) gathered and tended crops to contribute to the tribe.
Like you say, agriculture gradually got more and more efficient. Better tools, better breeding, etc, and the tribes that grew crops and raised animals were able to feed more people than the ones that hunted and gathered alone. This intensified after the bronze age.
Agriculture is beneficial because it causes abundance and predictability, even if it is more work on average. It's a ton of work to produce even 430,000 kCal of veggies (the amount found in a single modern cow), especially with early breeds of potatoes (which were tiny). I would wager that if you did the energy spent vs energy acquired calculation that hunting comes out way ahead of farming.
With farming you have to plan ahead for months at a time. The difference is that agriculture manifests abundant energy for consumption that would otherwise not exist. That's a huge evolutionary advantage, and obviously the entire reason we're able to have this discussion hundreds of miles apart from each other at instantaneous speed.
Extant hunter gatherers, living without access to modern medicine, have been studied to show life expectancy closer to 70.
"the expected annual probability of death for a 65-y-old hunter-gatherer is about 5.3%; in contrast, for 65-y-olds in Japan today, the chance of death is only about 0.8%.
See for example: Gurven, M., & Kaplan, H. (2007). Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination.
Population and Development Review, 33(2), 321–365.
doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007.00171.x [1]
It was discussed here [2]:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12o4py/what_...
For the longest living group estimate, 5 year olds can expect to live to ~54, 10 year olds to 55, and even 20 year olds only have a life expectancy of 60. Life expectancy only starts approaching 70 for a hunter-gatherer who survived into his 40s.
This would put life expectancy of young adult hunter-gatherers ahead of that of young adults living in historical agricultural societies, but behind that of those living in highly developed countries in the last several decades. The life expectancy of people living in developed countries today has more than "gained back what was lost since the industrial and technological revolutions."
[1] Enter DOI into sci-hub for full text.
[2] The link to the full text of the PDF in that Reddit post is now broken, which is why I noted the DOI.
“Maximum lifespan is believed to be under genetic control”
Given modern medicine etc. more people are approaching the maximum lifespan, but we aren’t increasing the maximum.
Some people in the middle ages lived well into their 80s, just not nearly as many as today.
For example, 600 years ago Michelangelo lived to be 88. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo
It's also incorrect to attribute shorter historical life expectancy only to infant mortality. That's why I replied to the post by mullingitover. In 1900 Americans had barely even odds of living to age 60 once they had already survived to age 18. Again referencing the Social Security data I originally linked, life expectancy at age 18 increased by 17.3 years (60.3 to 77.6 years), or 29%, over the course of the 20th century.
The maximum life spans documented among the very oldest people are also interesting, and show much smaller gains, but are separate from questions of average life expectancy among infants, children, or young adults.
How old is this proverb?
Cancer, Alzheimer's, CHD, diabetes' complications and pneumonia gets most people these days. If you live long enough these days, either your heart will give out, your circulatory system will leak and you'll die from shock, you'll get pneumonia or an infection. Finally, the vast majority of end-of-life operations are worse than nothing at all by worsening quality-of-life... hospice is better in most circumstances.
PS: follow the holistic/comprehensive list of preventative lifestyle changes for Alzheimer's so you can go out with your mind as intact as possible and stay fit/able-bodied to where you don't need long-term care (LTC). As an example, the grandpa of that young guy from that show Gold Rush; what a full- and active-life that guy had.
Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”
Genesis 6:3.
I don't know how old Genesis really is, but 2000 B.C. might be a good enough guess. So yeah, pretty thoroughly.