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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

It sounds rather a lot less pleasant when you describe it as a straw pallet.

That said, early humans that managed to survive childhood most likely had generally pleasant lives. That and their average level of physical fitness based on archeological evidence would rate at the elite level today. I recall reading about a fossilized set of footprints in Australia that indicated a foot speed that would shame Usain Bolt, and presumably fossilization doesn’t have a foot speed bias.

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>I recall reading about a fossilized set of footprints in Australia that indicated a foot speed that would shame Usain Bolt

I can't help but feel that guy must have really been scared by something.

Welp, down I go the rabbit hole of looking for how one might guess the speed of a runner from foot prints

Or he was hunting, and something was really scared by him.

I think clever hunting should not require alot of running, as a human.

In Hooked, Nir Eyal talked about a tribe in South Africa whose members hunt a particular animal (I forgot its name) by running behind it for 8 hours straight.

This works for many larger animals. Humans have the benefit of being able to sweat and regulate our body temperature efficiently so all we need to do it chase the animal until it overheats and is exhausted. I'm not sure of the animal you were hearing about, but for many animals this would be way less than 8hrs (probably even as little as 10 minutes, maybe less).

Usually, that was rather a mix of walking, walking fast, and the occasional jog. The animal just broke down from exhaustion in the end, exactly _because_ it had been running all day.

Humans can out run and hunt down most animals because we evolved hairless sweating for cooling.

(Persistance hunting)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

I've always thought the Human/Wolf tag team must have been really frustrating for all the other animals. The two most successful persistence hunting species teaming up would be pretty lame for the prey species.

Like playing a game against a pro "this isn't even fair" throws controller

However that doesn't require being faster than Usain Bolt and actually works because we are better at long distance running than short sprints.

Humans were good at long distance running hunting

Does anyone know any details about how the archaeologist derived foot speed from ancient fossilized footprints? I've come across this before but took it with a big pinch of salt.

I assume it’s mainly first year calculus since the defining characteristic of running is that it’s repeated launching. Since the downward vector of gravity is a constant I’d imagine a foot to same foot distance is sufficient to solve for speed.

And this is just my first thought as a semi-educated layman. I have no doubt the experts who study these things think of and solve for many other factors. I may not be able to reproduce their work but I can judge it plausible.

> I’d imagine a foot to same foot distance is sufficient to solve for speed.

There surely must be an assumption about leg length, and that the person wasn't just playing some hop-scotch style game with long, slow, bounding strides. I think I'd need quite strong evidence to convince me that ancient humans were as fast as someone with modern nutrition and training. Especially as (unless I'm mistaken) there's no indication that people in hunter gatherer lifestyles today are particularly fast.

A large stride doesn't equal a faster speed. A large stride is beneficial to a mid-distance pace like 800m or mile, but for sprints you'd want faster turnover with shorter more powerful strides.

I’d imagine spacing of prints, how the foot engaged with the ground, depth of print, etc...

> early humans that managed to survive childhood most likely had generally pleasant lives

Well, of course: they'd never live long enough to become weak, whiny, and regretful.

One idea put forth in Civilized to Death is that this sentiment is a mis-meme stemming from the common knowledge that average life spans have increased in modern times.

That while, sure, the average has gone up, this is primarily due to decreases in infant mortality rates. So there’s a plethora of zeros skewing down the average for “back then”.

That is, if you survived through childhood back then, you’d likely expect to live just about as long as everyone today.

> That is, if you survived through childhood back then, you’d likely expect to live just about as long as everyone today.

Somehow I doubt that very much. I grew up in an emerging economy. Between the last few decades, life expectancy at birth went up from mid 50s to high 60s. Infant mortality went down, but not enough to cause the rise in life expectancy.

Anecdotally, I know most of my immediate family didn't make it past 70, but that's changing now. Relatively simple to treat chronic diseases such as cardiac issues and diabetes got them.

I’m not arguing one way or another, these are all very broad claims in both directions.

But if you’re interested, that books also speculates that many such health issues, including the above, are relatively recent human ailments brought on by the modern diet facilitated by agriculture.

As a counterpoint, the industrial revolution drastically dropped urban life expectancies.

In visits to a number of developing countries I’ve made the same observation: driving from the wealthy, developed part where we were staying, out of the city and into the countryside I’d notice that the very worst poverty seemed to be not in the (technically poorest) countryside where the old, rural life still went on, but on the edges of modernity. The people at the edges of the city had left behind the benefits of the traditional way of life — being self-sustainable, ok nutrition, good air etc. — and were really only experiencing the drawbacks of modern life; few of the benefits.

It’s only a personal observation, but in my reading of history I wonder if the same pattern applies.

I had recently read a book about the 1918 flu, and it had made the point that these urban cities, at the time, required a constant influx of workers, just to replace those deceased.

So, to actually increase the labor pool, required a tremendous amount of human life.

I’ve read the same thing about Ancient Rome. It required a high influx of people because life expectancy in the city was so short.

I suspect the higher disease loads and lower fertility rate had a lot to do with that. But maybe not that things were better in rural villages either. Considering all of history rural areas had higher but the population wasn't increasing very fast. That is until you had mechanized farming.

I’d wonder if that’s orthogonal to the issue at hand though - Native American tribes experienced a glut of such diseases when they began transitioning onto anglo-Saxon style diets. We know that many communities across the world nowadays achieve advanced years by having simple diets and strong communities, and hunter-gatherers had that + rigorous exercise. As another comment on this page states, the typical hunter-gatherer was leagues more physically fit than the average person today.

I remember as a child an elderly relative of mine talked about how there were no restaurants in his day, and I just assumed that restaurants hadn't reached his part of the world until recently. It turns out some of the world's oldest restaurants are from his part of the world, and that he simply grew up during a very unstable time. Your experience may be similar to his.

Yep. Averages don't tell you much unless you know the shape of the distribution.

If you're talking up to a couple thousands years ago (Medieval up to Roman times), it was possible to live pretty long if you were wealthy enough to afford food and shelter. For reference many well known greek writers reached 70+.

If you're talking prehistoric times, the food supply was very limited with no agriculture and no trade. You'd die of food shortage sooner rather than later, physically unable to hunt or to keep up with the nomadic tribe.

That is assuming that one didn't die because of war or disease. Most infections meant certain death with no antibiotics.

The decline in infant mortality had a huge effect, but more people today are living to their 70s and 80s than most of human history.

People definitely lived into their 60s - 80s centuries ago, but they also used to die a lot more often from infections, disease, accidents etc. Public health infrastructure (clean water and sewage), antibiotics, vaccines and drugs like statins have all helped a lot.

Here's a fascinating chart on date of death of US women in 1933 vs. 2014. The distribution of age at death is narrowing, and more women are making it to old age: https://media.eurekalert.org/multimedia_prod/pub/web/127460_...

Maximum life expectancy though, has unfortunately remained extremely steady. It is very unlikely that anyone reading this will live past 105 without a massive tech breakthrough.

>their average level of physical fitness based on archeological evidence would rate at the elite level today

you don't see a contradiction between "pleasant life" and top fitness? I mean what can be a reason that the average was such a high level of physical fitness? May it be that "pleasant life" was so rife with challenges and dangers that only top fitness allowed for survival?

Imagine a life where you had to strenuously hunt for 30 hours a week and then partied for the rest of the time. It’d result in both a high level of physical fitness and be pretty pleasant. I don’t know if that’s an accurate description of their life, but it shows that the two terms aren’t contradictory.

's/hunt/study/' and that is our University years. While definitely pleasant, it didn't result in high mental fitness though :)

We'll that explains why stone toolkits stayed pretty similar for thousands of years. Ancient hunter gatherers were a bunch of frat boys with some elders (that can still move with the hunting band/clan) leading them.

City living aren't that healthy (especially in the Neolithic) but you have lots of time to make new things... And use them in the future instead of needing to abandon them when your band moves on.

You are not at a high fitness level without a decent food supply.

That is thriving, not simply surviving.

you have to imagine we mostly descended from the groups which thrived and not the ones who eked by

> early humans that managed to survive childhood

As a new parent (14 m.o.), I keep wondering, how did early humans - in the pre-language, pre-writing times - managed to survive, given how much care and supervision small babies require?

My oldest took a lot of care and I was fairly cash strapped. He was constantly on my hip or strapped to my chest while I did things all day.

You can get a lot of menial labor done with an infant in tow while giving them attention.

It takes a village. Back in those days, humans lived in tribes and worked together to survive. Parents also had a lot of children, most of which died.

Living in groups, and having more babies (i.e. child birth rates always drop when conditions in a country improve)

They didn’t live in isolation like Western societies do today.

Are you trying to achieve things more complex than pick nuts and berries up off the ground and eat them?

Not die through picking up the wrong nuts and berries and eating them. Small kids try to eat literally anything they can get their hands on.

Also, prior to the evolution of language it would make sense for the children to be born a little more battle (still useless, but relative to what they will develop into) ready whereas a modern child is born requires some form of education be that in hunting or surgery.

It took a village ;-)

But in those times there weren’t villages, maybe troops or a gathering i man they said pre-language so that’s a ways back...

I imagine a tribe, like 50 to 100 people, is more than enough.

We're you referring to pallets used in warehouses/shipping? I think they're using a different definition, i.e. "a straw-filled tick or mattress", "a small, hard or temporary bed".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pallet

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