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Comment by next_xibalba | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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