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Comment by civilitty | Hacker News Reader

Were they actually socialized for thousands of years? The average (sub)urban school in the US teaches more kids every day than the average person would have come in contact with in their entire lives, often ten times over. Most people were subsistence farmers and didn't travel very far from their little village in their entire life.

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Arguably any period of history where the majority of people lived as subsistence farmers and rarely interacted with others not part of the household was an anomaly though, and very different to how pre-agricultural societies lived.

It's very likely just a US thing. You go to Europe, you see villages (as in groups of houses) and agricultural fields extending out from each village. While US, I believe it's isolated houses surrounded by farmland.

Oh I suspect it was quite common in much of Europe for fairly long periods too, when there very limited options for travel for vast majority of people, who were in fact farmers. Yes, the farms were small, but most of your energy went into tending those, and interactions with those even only a km or so away was possibly often only once a week. I don't think it's an environment most people would thrive in though.

I seriously doubt it since isolated families would have to worry about marauders, thieves, being in they way of some oncoming army, etc and being within a community buffers against that. America you had more space, less density of people, more recent movement of peoples, so probably they didn't have to worry about such things.

The average medieval subsistence farmer probably had ~10000 people living within 6 miles of them. People tended to live in areas with fertile land, and the land could easily support 100-200 people per square mile.

Teaching about the world isn't the same as socialisation. Having said that, they did learn about their world.

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