You would never feel like you have time to just, be. Instead you're focused on getting your next meal, and finding a place to sleep.
It only took a few ice-ages to force us to get smart about how we organize and then here we are.
Given how plentiful and available food sources were, I don't imagine their life could have been considered stressful in that regard. As a hunter gatherer there's also a specific point at which there's nothing really left to do: There's no point in hunting/collecting more food than you can eat before it rots. No infinite treadmill to run. Nobody who always has "more" regardless of how hard you work.
You on the other hand have a lot to stress out about in modern society, not even considering that if there's any major breakdowns in the systems we have established to feed our massive populations, such as a disease that wipes out the majority of crops, the majority of us will be dead and starved within months if not weeks, with very little individuals can do about it. The planet can always feed a couple of us, but can't feed billions if things aren't operating somewhat smoothly.
Like, without cats storing grain becomes so, so much harder; maybe basically impossible/unfeasible. Without storing grain you don't get cities as easily or as long.
Same with transporting food by boat; you gotta have a cat on your trireme or what are you even doing Andronikos.
Countless poets, writers, scientists and artists have been directly inspired by cats. I could easily believe yoga was inspired by them too.
It seems likely that models, royalty, and the concept of grace itself are all directly inspired by cats.
And then there's the profound cultural significance of Toxoplasmosis over the millenia; cats are (usually) calming; introverts can hang with cats all day...
There are certain personalities that are often attributed to modern sources, but haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte) living in a shack that has a predilection to collect herbs/mine rocks/watch the skies/you name it, that isn't thought much of or seems productive until someone gets sick/needs ore/wants to know the weather/etc?
All that said, what did crazy cat people do before cats???
I would bet the first human to do lots of stuff was that weird eccentric dude(tte). Who else would come up with writing, or words, or carry fire, or wear clothes, domesticate a wolf, etc.
> what did crazy cat people do before cats???
I have no idea, but that's a great question.
Speaking so generally, the ancient Greeks noted that all these are means for achieving higher goals. How many people think about that today? Quantity is not followed by quality.
Horses also have semi similar more specialized analogues - you could argue Camels filled a similar niche for very dry areas. And other animals like Goats/Llamas/Alpacas for mountainous areas.
We like to say that dogs are wired to understand human language patterns, but who's not to say that we're not wired to emit canine 'linguistics'?
Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.
How many broken teeth did you just suffer with for the rest of your life? Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.
Mosquitos carried pathogens, the other food sources were also of random quality.
If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
I could keep going on, but the point is, being a self-aware mammal would have been absolutely torturous.
Yes, people back then suffered a lot of broken bones, even fractured skulls. But just like their bones tell that story, we also know that they often survived those injuries and their broken bones (and even skulls!) healed. People lived in groups and cared for injured.
Also a scratch is probably not going to kill you. It could, but likely won't.
> Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.
Going after the children of an organized group of apex predators is probably not going to end well for the attackers.
And yes, sometimes women died in childbirth, but not that often (otherwise you wouldn't be here to type that). Also there's still a decent risk of that if you live in the US.
> Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.
Extremely rare on a hunter-gatherer diet. Our ancestors lost the ability to produce their own vitamin C internally millions of years ago, because they just didn't need it. Most other mammals still can.
> Mosquitos carried pathogens
Human-adapted mosquitos hadn't evolved to the degree they have today, so bites would have been much rarer, but pathogens causing fun diseases such as malaria did already exist.
> the other food sources were also of random quality.
You mean the food sources we evolved to consume? Are you talking about parasites? Most of the nasty ones really only started becoming an issue when humans gave them breeding grounds in their settlements.
> If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
I guess?
> I could keep going on,
Please don't. You are clearly just guessing and making stuff up as you go.
That said, of course hunter-gatherer life was much riskier than modern life, but that was just their normal. Hedonic adapation and all that.
A few things AFAIK anyone has to grant about this period:
- Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers lived all over the world, under vastly different climates, for ~100,000 years.
- These humans were anatomically modern in every sense. They had lives every bit as complex as ours.
- Human cultural, political, and social structures are and have always been inherently diverse.
- Humans have always impacted and managed their environments for better and for worse.
- The Neolithic Revolution occurred independently in multiple places over generations as a series of choices by individuals at least roughly as intelligent as we are.
- Humans who adopted agriculture came to out-populate those who didn't.
The idea that hunter-gatherers lived consistently affluent lives and enjoyed plenty of leisure time as a general rule doesn't neatly fit this picture for me. How is it more likely than the idea that these people lived basically evenly along a spectrum of fluctuating and diverse conditions, at the mercy and grace of natural systems and social trends?
Perhaps depending on the context some human groups lucked into a life of luxury, while others lived painful lives consumed by the anxiety of dwindling supplies, all as an accident of climate patterns, the spread of disease, or even human-caused overconsumption.
Even in early societies that won a Garden of Eden in the geographic lottery, what's more human than to invent new complex problems to stew over based on generational trauma, or simply wild speculation about a world we will always have limited understanding of? Perhaps some group of humans highly valued their downtime hobbies while others were obsessed with arbitrary hierarchies, wars to obtain slaves, or settling petty disputes between powerful families.
Agriculture at the very least provided predictable trade-offs that smooth out the previous extremes, and we can't know if on balance it was a strictly negative or positive change. Since then, however, I think it's safe to say that the lives of everyone I know is better off than a practitioner of early agriculture.
If you wanted, you could ask any of the people living like that today what it’s like. You can find them even in any American city.
Spoken like someone who easily affords both rent and food.
> Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.
Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' - but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.
> You would never feel like you have time to just, be.
Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.
We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old. Pentatonic tuning!
It's more a pop culture artefact than accepted science. Original idea of paleolithic abundancy was made in sixties by rather artsy approach to the data collected in modern Kalahari. Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.
Which, taking into account that their chores were quite physically demanding, makes a less rosy picture. That's not even mentioning that however primitive were Kalahari experiences of in the middle of XX century, they are unlikely to be fully representative of paleolithic state of affairs in e.g. Northern Eurasia.
That said they probably socialized more than us for many reasons, just not instead of work.
Well, yes, climate and ecology matter a lot. Still, I believe that figure is including things like making sure a pot doesn't boil over, ie low intensity chores; and includes 'social' tasks which look and feel very different to, say, factory work.
Still, the idea that life was "nasty brutish and short" for most of human history is thoroughly debunked. Life wasn't constant misery for everyone, despite what many people learned in school.
I think it's important that we remember what we've lost, as much as what we've gained. Whether we worked 3 hours a day or 7.5, no one (outside slavery) was working 60 hours a week and just keeping their heads above water despite thousands of years of 'progress'.
That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe organised into a group to catch anything large, but the flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering and eating what you want.
In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of time gathering food.
Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the agricultural revolution. It was great for population numbers, but is increasingly seen as bad for individuals. People lived shorter lives, had shorter bodies, and were more subject to disease after the agricultural revolution.
The stakes are lower, but not the work level required, and they all do it for funzies, essentially.
It’s neat what we do to each other…