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Comment by mrburton | Hacker News Reader

This proves humans are not animals. We're not that smart ;)

Sick people are sort of viscerally gross, we're repulsed by wet coughs, even the sound of vomiting some people can't cope with, not even on a movie -- it's an evolutionary response, I think. Animals probably have similar feelings around sick people.

>even the sound of vomiting some people can't cope with, not even on a movie -- it's an evolutionary response

The later is probably devolution at play, from having fallen into a too cushy a life in non-evolutionary time ranges (modern cities)...

Can you explain why you think this is a modern thing?

IMO if someone in your group starts vomiting can mean the food we just ate is bad so would be safe to throw up sooner then later.

I was raised with animals in a village and I have no trouble with cleaning animal excrement but human excrement's smell instantly has an effect on my stomach(I had to get some samples for a medical test from my son poop). But sure there are daily working with such thing and they get used to it.

>Can you explain why you think this is a modern thing?

Because past societies were much more open to bodily functions and accepting some degrees of "dirt".

Why do you think so? People were not shitting in the corner of the room like animals(if they had a choice), they would go shit outside and i am not aware of any historical ritual involving shit but let me know if there is some perspective I am missing.

I think there are still many people around the world that are living in extreme poverty and I am sure they still feel disgusted by shit,bad food and putrefied bodies - so are you basing your theory on something you read or is something you think is correct , I will be happy to change my mind so please inform me.

In an article on Cholera or more it's solution in London building sewers the author reposted a letter to the news paper that castigated the upper classes. The gist of it was 'You say we don't mind living in filth and stink. Assuredly we do not like it at all'

I would ignore cities since this is a modern thing and people were forced to live into those bad conditions, let's think about tribes and villages where you had the space to shit outside, even in cold winter the people would go outside and take a dump and not shit inside.

The old testament says you need to do your business a quarter mile from camp. And bury it.

The emotion of disgust is related to disease and how likely we are to catch something. You will likely find an open festering wound disgusting, rotten food or a filthy bathroom.

We probably traded off getting some very contagious diseases but sticking together to living off by ourselves. In the long run it seemed to have been a good decision for our species.

Exactly. The same applies to the individual, and exposure to bugs is beneficial to the immune system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

When HN becomes Twitter. People are so serious and sensitive these days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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