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Comment by pacbard | Hacker News Reader

The hunter-gatherers in the study lived in the "Late Holocene (~4000 to 250 BP)", meaning between 2000 BCE to 1825 CE. These people are separated from us by less than 150 generations. I don't believe that humans evolve that fast, so the way you think, feel, ache, and so on also applies to them. Would you leave behind your injured and disabled in their situation (which is speculated to be the result of hunting accidents)?

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Anthropology started at a time when people thought civilizations evolved in a straight line from savages to England. But it's hard to pretend that the natives sat around a rock grunting at each other when their e.g. bone-setting techniques were essentially modern, so there's a tradition of "not as benighted as you might have thought" articles.

WHY that point of view still exists is a question every anthro novice asks, and it turns out that cultural evolution is too attractive an idea for some people to let go of.

> sat around a rock grunting at each other

Seems crazy to me, given anyone with children that is exposed to multiple languages can easily imagine how complex the language scene must have been in humans that did not write, given how easy and natural it is for little ones to pick up different languages that they speak with different people.

Most likely even Heidelbergensis had "complex grunting" and hand signs so humans in the neolithic are effectively identical to us in language capability.

But then why did they spend so much time without writing or with the same level of tech for so long?

Go ahead. Invent some new tech that absolutely no one know about or how to do and that isn't based on any known tech. I'm waiting. What's taking so long?

Discovering stuff is hard and harder if you don't think you need it. People kept fire going before they knew how to start fires. If you don't know about the concept of flint or lighting dry stuff with sparks, it is really hard to invent fire starting. Writing isn't as useful if you can just learn what you need to know while growing up. A more complicated world later - as are discoveries slowly started to build up - probably created the need.

But again, those discoveries are hard and they took time. A really long time, apparently.

I think there is a tendency to project the modern era's speed of technological progress back in time, which isn't reasonable. We went from the Wright Brothers to Apollo 11 in 66 years. The first transistor to the iPhone in ~60 years. That rate of development is...new.

My thinking is that they didn’t have any time to invent new things. They did chores and then died.

Hunter gatherers had a ton of free time. It's almost impossible to describe how thick on the ground resources were pre-industrialization.

check your privilege, you anglos think you are the best culture, you have It so ingrained you dont even notice it

I believe they were joking. Maybe you should check your sense of humour?

Why is it written BP? These archaeology people / Phys.org really need to cease with that confusing nonsense. BP is supposedly "Before Present" or "Before Physics" modern referring to practical radiocarbon dating with a cutoff date of January 1, 1950. [1] Way too easy to transpose BCE / BC / BP.

[1] WP, Before Present: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present

It's written like these people were supposedly cave people, yet based on this story's confusing usage, these people were caring for each other after the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of South America up to the 1700's. 4000 BP is the "really Late Holocene" 2050 BCE, 250 BP is 1700 AD. Also, the "late Holocene" goes all the way to Y2K (2000 AD). [2] The Meghalayan is the "the current age or latest geologic age." [3]

[2] WP, Holocene Era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene

[3] WP, Meghalayan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meghalayan

Really does make me wonder if these people know what they're doing / writing.

  I don't believe that humans evolve that fast

Evidence of animals doing this exists. Unsure why anyone would be surprised theres evidence of humans doing this.

It's really wild to me how many humans believe their feelings are so different from animals. Most animals have similar incentives and desires, humans just have "better" tools to achieve them.

Grieving orcas have been found to move their dead babies around for many weeks. Chimps will fetch plants like Scutia myrtina, which is toxic in large amounts but acts as a anthelmintics (anti-worm drug), for fellow members of their group when they're sick. Elephants will defend their wounded and even bring food or water to them or help them stand up when they're struggling to.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're absolutely right. These types of behaviors can be seen all throughout the animal world. Especially for animals showing degrees of eusociality.

These feelings are also extremely important for the preservation of one's species. No wonder evolution took this approach in multiple occasions, animals tend to get lonely if they aren't kind to one another, leaving themselves open to get killed. The incentive is there to have strength in numbers, and being "emotional" in some ways contributes to further that.

The people they talk about are contemporary to the Babylonions who have already absorbed the urban Uruk civilization that started to peak a millenium prior. The difference isn't biology but resource density and climate favorability leading to higher social organization.

The costs and benefits faced by ancient humans were very, very different. Maybe a different way to frame the question would be "At what probability of additional death, injury, or suffering (to you or other tribe members) would you abandon your injured/disabled?" Humans of that era did not have anything even remotely approaching modern medicine and most lived at subsistence levels with starvation always at their doorstep. A huge portion of ancient peoples energy and time was dedicating to obtaining calories. That means caring for the injured/disabled imposes a huge cost and risk. We can just as easily find examples of ancient peoples murdering or abandoning their injured, disabled, and weak. I don't think it would be right or fair to judge them through a modern lens. Of course they cared for their loved ones and mourned their deaths. But they were faced with much harsher circumstances to which their cultures and beliefs were suited.

It would be helpful to provide some citations and evidence around the claim “ most lived at subsistence levels with starvation always at their doorstep”. There is an increasing amount of evidence that this was not the case.

https://medium.com/sapere-aude-incipe/our-distorted-image-of...

> most lived at subsistence levels with starvation always at their doorstep

Genuine question: is this something we know from evidence, or an assumption? I vaguely recall having read that comparison between skeletal remains of early farmers and hunter-gatherers indicated that the latter had a better diet, but I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly or how much that observation generalizes.

We actually have a ton of evidence refuting this. The two things anthropologists spend their whole time rejecting in popular sciences is the barter myth and the idea that hunter-gatherer lives are "nasty brutish and short".

The nasty brutish and short idea might have been true about many medieval European peasants but the rest of the world wasn't cramped up with livestock and poverty conditions with poor sanitation. Other people simply didn't face as much disease. There was actually some really interesting work in bioarcheology in 2018 that showed that even extremely long lifespans was not actually that rare.[0] And those who made it to adulthood could generally expect a long life (obviously tons of variation here). In the city of Cholula, Mexico, between 900 and 1531, most people who made it to adulthood lived past the age of 50.[1]

[0] https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-n...

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.22329

Not to mention the famous "Man the Hunter" symposium where Marshall Sahlins introduced the Original Affluent Society Thesis which has since been largely upheld and reinforced.

Both early farmers and hunter-gatherers regularly endured calorie scarcity. The difference between them along this dimension is minor compared to the difference between either group and us and our calorie security.

> most lived at subsistence levels with starvation always at their doorstep

I find this hilarious. Modern civilization has starvation at our doorstep. If the modern supply chains fail, so very many would starve.

Did toilet paper become scarce about 5 years ago? I don't see what protects the population from that for food and water.

you have a point actually. Non-agricultural people had much more varied diets and we have almost zero archeological examples of famines leading to mass deaths of non-agricultural peoples but we have plenty of examples of that happening to agricultural people. Agriculture was, especially initially, a huge step back in food security.

Obviously things have changed a lot since then but some of the risks remain. Cuba is a fascinating case study for what happens when a modern agricultural supply chain can collapse (due to US sanctions). Many many died. But since then there's been a massive focus on locally grown food and even wild tending. I know many people who are into permaculture and alternatives to industrial agriculture who have traveled there to study

This feels like video game analysis. Unit is likely to die, therefore do not spend resources on unit. Leave unit behind.

There is no world in which I would leave a family member or close friend to die in the woods alone, especially if I have no idea what germs are, why people die when they bleed, and am listening to a voice I have heard my whole live cry out in pain. Even if I knew for sure they were going to die, I would sit with them, or move them, or something.

Thought experiment: Would you visit your mother or father in the hospital knowing they were going to die that day? I mean there's nothing you can do, why bother??

It's not about writing off the injured due to their low odds of survival, its about your willingness to lower those odds for your other loved ones, or yourself. How does your thought experiment change when caring for your mother/father means your children might starve?

Look man, modern people die trying to save strangers from drowning. We can just see actual behavior, we don't need bloodless thought experiments

Ok but for every person who tries to save a stranger from drowning how many other people choose not to? Probably not 0. If I saw a stranger drowning and they were larger than child-sized I probably wouldn't attempt it- apparently its pretty common for the drowning person to panic and use their savior as a raft, drowning them in the process

Why do volunteer firefighters rush into a burning building to try to save children from some family they have never met before? Every day we afforded examples of people sacrificing their personal interests for the benefit of others.

But also, biologists usually use a definition of "altruism" that does not include close kin. Richard Dawkins was explicit about this in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." Helping someone you are directly related to is not considered altruism.

It's literally a skill issue. The correct way to help a drowning person is to get behind them and then hook your weaker arm around their neck & head while doing backstroke with the other. Having them on their back facing up (and out of the water) dispels the panic reflex. But this obviously requires you to be comfortable int he water and have some prior rescue training.

I think in the premodern era, you never saw strangers (not like we do). You probably had a pretty good idea who everyone was, and probably knew most people pretty well. If that's even partially true, then although nowadays you might drive past a person on the highway, if your cousin or a lifelong trusted acquaintance asked for help you'd give it. It seems that everyone you saw, esp saw injured or sick, was probably someone you've known your whole life.

You're also heavily discounting the fact that you had to live not only with yourself if you did nothing, but the shame/angst of their family who you definitely lived next door to. TFA is about taking care of "their own", not strangers.

Good way to look at it. More broadly, there must have been different groups that practiced different policies with regard to ill and injured. Some of the groups fared better than others. Since most of modern societies do care about their ill and injured, it appears that this policy proved more advantageous. Even if only slightly so.

Can you conceive of how caring for the injured might have a benefit in an evolutionary / game theoretical sense?

This is the right question to ask. You can reason your way around things, but occam's razor reigns supreme. Injured people can still do lots of work, as our most important tools were our brains, not our bodies. It's not hard to watch for predators near camp while sitting at the campfire, or to keep an eye on children - even if you can't resolve issues yourself. You could sit around making crafts for the tribe, repairing clothes, and more.

There's just way too much benefit to keeping the injured around. We don't need everyone working at top physical condition... ever.

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