It's not good of course, and will have health repercussions.
But I remember that sitting around a campfire or in a hut with a fire going all your life is the way people lived for the first million years. And I hope we have some resilience to smoke.
But I remember that sitting around a campfire or in a hut with a fire going all your life is the way people lived for the first million years. And I hope we have some resilience to smoke.
We do have some resilience to mild amounts of occasional smoke, which keeps us from dying immediately, but we know long term exposure does damage, and the levels we’re seeing in the mega-fires has been far beyond what we’re evolved to breathe. Even the typical pollution in urban areas is measurably bad for health.
Spending nights in a small earth-floor house with a wood fire in the middle is warm and convenient for cooking but the smoke is absolutely miserable, even after you sort of get used to it. It stings your eyes and your throat, chokes you, and long-term exposure causes all sorts of nasty health consequences (lung cancer, ...).
It’s much worse than the second-hand smoke from the smokiest cigarette-smoke-filled room you have ever experienced.
(When people argue that the pre-industrial past was better because there was no air pollution, it’s hard not to laugh.)
It’s a kind of romantic rustic experience occasionally in your life just to get an idea what rural people’s lives have been like throughout history and for a change from a sanitized suburban lifestyle, but it’s very unhealthy for people who have to live that way all the time. It’s little surprise that when people obtain the resources and infrastructure to switch to some other method of heating/cooking, they leap at the chance.
Soot and smoke was one of many hazards.
>Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54), with a 60% probability of reaching 15.
When we hear about average life expectancies of the days of yore, infant mortality is almost always factored into this calculation. The truth is, if a human made it past infancy, their life expectancy approached 65+.
So, when speaking of cavemen or Ancient Egyptians or whatever, when we hear "average life expectancy of ~30", or "most of us died before 30", it's technically and semantically correct when including all those babes that died in their first year or two of life, but it's misleading and thus not very useful.
I don't know if it's historians and anthropologists trying to be cute or pedantic or what, but I wish this meme would just die, because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past.
Life expectancy has improved a lot in general, but less dramatically at old ages.
I assume this is at least partly deliberate, because it's a major part of what has been termed the "Religion of Progress," in which the history of humanity, when you squint hard enough and ignore most of the actual history, is a "rising line from the caves to the stars." Life in the past must be worse than life today in every reasonable way you can describe it, and life in the future must be better than today, because this is what's demanded by the current myths.
The problem, of course, is that any moderately in depth study of the history of humanity demonstrates that this absolutely hasn't been the case, outside the effects of the industrial revolution from the past 250 years or so - which, as is now becoming rather obvious, has some serious downsides as well as the assorted miracles it's produced. And the focus of some of the (if not brightest, at least best paid) members of society on tricking other people into staring at a bunch of tiny flickering dots for as long as they possibly (while the world is literally burning around them) can doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's going to be considered particularly well in the future. Not that we should be praising it right now.
JM Greer has done some solid writing on the "Religion of Progress" concept, and it's just depressing how often you see life and history crammed into that mold, because it's the way we've been trained to think of the world. It's also going to be responsible (or is being responsible) for a lot of mental anguish when reality refuses to deliver what we think the future ought to be. Humans won't go to the stars. We probably won't ever have flying cars, Jetsons-style. Etc.
So, my favorite distinction is between “life expectancy” (which is a misleading average that includes early mortality) and “longevity”, which is what people often really mean, the typical length of life of someone who doesn’t die early of some kind of accident or disease while young. Longevity is the word to use for living to a ripe old age and to factor out infant mortality.
If you want to be really triggered, take a look at the graph at the bottom of this article by Ray Kurzweil: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
That is so wrong and so completely and intentionally misleading (note how it leaves out known data points from the mid 1900s and from before 1850, and how the article is intentionally conflating longevity and life expectancy) that it has convinced me that Kurzweil is a charlatan and I can’t trust a single thing he’s written. It’s a bummer because I really enjoyed his keynote on double exponential growth and eventual immortality at Siggraph one year. Fun ideas but now I see he and the other eternal life pseudo scientists are selling snake oil.
Rich kids with asthma spent summers at the country manor.
Proper air filtration and maintenance is something to pay attention to in new builds.
Humans have had more genetic change in the last 50,000 years than in the 1M before that. One train of thought is, civilization put entirely new pressures on us and we adapted.
Smoke has been with us for a very long time. It's almost certain that we have some adaptation to it.