You first.
And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
There are still a number of uncontacted peoples and international groups that advocate for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
Some can't imagine life without antibiotics, others can't fathom living with everything else that comes with it.
Anyone who is of a modern industrialized society who is waxing poetically about becoming a hunter gatherer is both, looking at history thru very rose colored goggles and welcome to go find a place to do just that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c
Many people that have lived side by side with indigenous people across northern australia, the islands, PNG, et al have a clear idea of exactly what living off the land entails.
A good many have done exactly that for extended periods, dropping in and out from one to the other.
They would have done this sans any condescending permission from those wishing them well - such opinions count for naught.
Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or coercion. But many didn't. So many groups have wanted to participate in technological progress, even at the cost of giving up their previous way of life, that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted.
But?
> you've selected one particular group.
I used as examples some specific individuals of one named group, yes. I also had in mind other specific individuals of a few other families - all these groups share the same major language group.
There are other similar examples across the globe, of course, there's an entire island that famously prefers no contact- but I'm making a brief comment not writing a book.
> Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or coercion. But many didn't.
If I were to pursue this I'd likely argue that a majority of adaptions happened with more force, less willingness, and at a pace faster than desired by the less technologically advanced side.
> So many groups have wanted to participate in technological progress,
Indeed. Many are curious about water but didn't expect a hose shoved down their throats with a bucket load funnelled in endlessly with no off tap.
> that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted.
I'm assuming this refers to those groups that want to retain autonomy but have difficulty doing so.
In many such cases that I'm aware of the problem stems less from former group members wanting to bring the outside in, more from outsiders (eg: loggers) wanting to clearfell habitat, miners wanting pits, etc.
eg: The entire West of PNG not wanting rule by Indonesia, various "Indonesians" not wanting their dense jungle homes cleared for palm oil plantations, various groups in Brazil, Native American Indians not wanting pipes to cross ther lands, giant copper mines on sacred grounds, etc.
You are focusing on the 0.01% of humanity which isn't part of mainstream modernity rather than the 99.99% which is. And you're discussing cases of extreme differential in technological knowledge and worldview (Amazon jungle, Papua New Guinea), rather than the vastly more common smaller gaps and asymmetries.
If a majority of adaptations happened with force, how do you explain the ones that didn't? Don't they suggest that even without any force there would have been convergence, just more slowly?
European settlers committed genocide against the native peoples of North America. I'm not denying that. But that happened in a context of a 400 year process of cultural exchanges and mergers in both directions. Arguably North Americans could not have ignored the written word or manufactured textiles in perpetuity, just as their societies adapted and mutated to accept the horse and steel tools.
Are you stating that no hunter gathers ever turned their backs on modern society despite antibiotics, dishwashers, and iPhones?
The claim I made in my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46179508 that prompted your response was a simple documented fact:
Antibiotics were not a sufficient factor to stop some people from rejecting technological society.
I'm not seeing the two errors there you claim.
> European settlers committed genocide against the native peoples of North America. I'm not denying that.
Cool. I mean that's not something I said, but hey, if you want to chuck that in, sure.
> But that happened in a context of a 400 year process of cultural exchanges and mergers in both directions.
I'm not sure 400 years of war, conflict and asymetric resource exchange makes up for the genocide part.
The Javanese subjugation of West Papua was a lot faster and equally or more brutal, the Europeans were largely hands off for that one, although they did quietly nod along and ignored the severed tonges and familial violence that accompanied the staged plebiscite :
Cute Name though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Free_Choice
Blackwater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrciT3lXtwE
He wasn't talking about going back, he was talking about staying.
> And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
I don't recall where I read this, but (probably hundreds of years ago) some explorer in Africa was on a boat with some hunter-gatherers. A bloated, rotting dead rat floated by, they picked it up, said "yum" and dug in. They didn't get sick. I've also read some speculation that (initially) fire wasn't needed so much for cooking meat, because hunter-gatherers can (and did) accomplish the same effect by letting meat rot a little. Fire was more useful for vegetables.
So actual hunter gatherers probably had less need for antibiotics than a modern person thrust into a similar situation.
Antibiotics and Insulin - those two things have saves untold lives.
Before about 1920, the difference between rich and poor and the likelihood to recover from disease had more to do with ability to rest and diet.
The rich and poor alike died to tuberculosis (which was often a death sentence until antibiotics), simple cysts, all sorts of very basic bacterial infections killed in droves.
At the risk of sidetracking this further - it was only after insulin where the idea that healthcare could be somewhat that could be a right became somewhat reasonable (before the late gilded age, doctors often did as much harm as good) - every lifesaving innovation we have made sense, were often very modest amounts of money is the difference between life and death make that argument stronger.
Type 1 is about 0.5% prevalence. Type 1 diabetes was a rapid death sentence before insulin discovery in the 1920s.
Type 2 is more common (maybe 10% but highly dependent on country) and it is a relatively modern problem
Infant mortality has dropped to 0.5% from 7% 100 years ago - so that's more significant.
Regarding your reference to how brutal and never-ending work was; As far as we know, many European medieval farmers had 1500-1800 working hours per year. It’s also a bit gloomy to assume the household was run by two parents and their kids - often, grandparents were colocated and helped until they couldn’t. What you‘ve described was certainly the case during famines and war, but not a permanent state.
There’s plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt, water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it’s not very hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit in the wild.
>factory farms
Didn’t need factory farms for smallpox. Many animals live in large herds, which were larger in the past. If you read accounts from the 18th and early 19th century there are many reports of squirrel migrations involving hundreds of millions of squirrels in relatively small areas.
We also know that there are viral epidemics in animals that live in solitary animals and animals that live in groups smaller than the size of hunter gatherer tribes.
An hunter-gathers were probably a lot more robust to that than modern people.
Think about it: if what you say were that big of an issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out before getting to us.
>Think about it: if what you say were that big of an issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out before getting to us.
Most wild animals are riddled with parasites and it’s common for for animals in captivity to have 2x the lifespan of their wild counterparts.
You don’t need to make it to 70 to raise children. If 50% of people make it to 30 and each person has an average of 5 kids the math works out fine for population growth.
The human immune system has both innate and acquired components. The innate systems are functionally the same between you and I or a hunter gatherer.
A hunter gatherer may have acquired immunity to viruses and bacteria that you or I haven’t been exposed to, but in most cases they would have become sick in the first place before they got that immunity. The majority of diseases don’t produce long lasting immunity. There’s a reason you get tetanus vaccines every 5-10 years.
We are also exposed to more pathogens than hunter gatherers not fewer because of the way we live. Plus we have vaccines, so if anything we have a more robust acquired immune system.
> introduction of those drugs drastically accelerated the evolution of the bacteria, viruses, etc.
Antibiotics accelerated the evolution of bacteria towards antibiotic resistance. Not towards greater virulence. Antibiotic resistance generally has a fitness penalty as well, so if anything modern bacteria would tend to be slightly less dangerous.
>antibacterial soap
Antibacterial soap can result in resistant bacteria and it also alters your bodies microbiome. Theres some evidence that it can make you more prone to autoimmune diseases, but no good evidence of a strong impact on your bodies ability to fight off diseases.
Certainly not to a level noticeable by an individual.
>look at Covid
The reason influenza infections went up was because people weren’t exposed to influenza, not because of lack of exposure to generic germs.
There weren’t more overall infections, they were just concentrated in time. If Covid hadn’t happened, those extra people who got the flu would have just gotten the flu earlier.
* Produce 5 kids in the first place.
* Take care of the kids that they were able to produce, making survival of even half them much less likely.
But in actuality, best we are able to determine hunter-gathers who made it into adulthood lived longer, healthier lives than those in agrarian lifestyles.
I admit they probably had a stronger immunologic system on average, by virtue of relying on it and "exercising" more often. Alternatively, people prone to getting sick just died early.
The comparison was with agrarian societies that were found in parallel, not "us", which presumably implies something about modern medicine. Have I misinterpreted you?
> There's no contradiction.
Was there reason to think that there was...? It is not clear what you are trying to add here.
H-G societies tend to be smaller groups where everyone in the village helps with childcare, so if a parent was out of action for a while the children could still be gathered.
This is covered in the book Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff, specifically with the Hadzabe people (Tanzania).
I believe the modern world creates a lot of mental health problems, loneliness, and unhappines, but it's absolutely physically safer and more survivable (and more comfortable) for a huge percentage of the developed world. (It creates those mental problems unnecessarily, given the level of technology we have, but deeply baked into our fairly-antisocial individualistic culture)
Yes, average life span was shorter back then because of child mortality. But the vast majority of surviving adults never reached age 80. Old age was 60-70 and many of these diseases only occur at 70+ in significant numbers.
Traded neolithic goods regularly crossed continents. If an axe head can cross the continent then so can a microscopic disease.
And also, even antiseptic treatment was in shorter supply than it is today, so it’s still a moot point.
I had what was most likely poison ivy. Covered both arms. And was spreading. What do you propose my nurse practitioner to do? Not prescribe any antibiotics? To what end? I should continue to suffer because of what reason?
In the case of poison ivy, all antibiotics would do is lower the already slim odds of a secondary infection. They wouldn't prevent the contact dermatitis/inflammation from urishiol.
Should I be dying before you grant me antibiotics? What kind of nonsense is this?
But yes, I think you should have developed some kind of infection, and being showing trouble of fighting it off, before you're given antibiotics.
When skin barrier gets broken like this, you are now vulnerable to bacterial infection.
I can't believe someone gave you anti biotics for poison ivy.
At this point I genuinely consider the medical system about as bad as the service department at a car dealership. They'll sell you anything technically legal just to keep their stats high.
No, the service department has a bad reputation for a reason. They tried to tell me a wiper blade would cost me USD 80 with a straight face. Not even the whole set, a single wiper blade. It costs under USD 15 anywhere else other than the dealership.
My guess is they are counting on people not looking at the itemized bill.
You may not have had symptoms, but that's a very different thing.
And I assume you've been vaccinated against all the usuals.
When I meant sick, I meant like a longer sustained thing that needs treatment of some kind. I didn't mean I never stayed in bed watching the price is right for two days.