Yeah, and even though you're fighting for your life every day then, it seems so much simpler and not so bad once you've developed a community that can share the chores. I watched this documentary on David Beckham's trip to the native tribes in Brazil. They're all very happy with their life. Everyone is very close and it's nice because all your time is spent with family. They get to be with nature all day, have fun and joke while collecting and preparing meals for the tribe, and afterwards they all sing and dance.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b046prs6

Yeah, if you lived past age 1 it might have been alright, until you died at 50.

FWIW, this article [0] says that short life expectancy is a myth, and that primitive cultures live as long as we do.

However, you are definitely right about infant mortality. Kids were 30 to 100 times more likely to die.

0) https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...

> Kids were 30 to 100 times more likely to die.

This means that life expectancy was short. It directly conflicts with

> short life expectancy is a myth, and that primitive cultures live[d] as long as we do

> primitive cultures live[d] as long as we do

BTW, an extremely minor point: I intentionally used present-tense because primitive cultures still exist.

Well, any culture existing today is by definition a modern culture. But, more substantively:

There are no cultures today which are comparable to primitive cultures of the past. One nice point I've seen made is that when hunter-gatherers were the rule, they could live on arable land. After the advent of agriculture, obviously, that became impossible.

> This means that life expectancy was short.

Surely you know what I meant. If you made it to middle-age you lived just as long.

The highest age was about the same, but they were more likely to die at every age than we are today. A 40 year old still could expect a shorter average life than a 40 year old today.

> The highest age was about the same

That's not what I took away from the article, but I could be wrong. That wouldn't be anything interesting to discuss or write about.

The actual happiness of hunter-gatherers is seriously in dispute. It's by no means a settled anthropological question.

For a useful perspective from the other side, you might want to read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

This is just my speculation but I bet it depended on wild animal populations, rainfalls vs droughts, peacefulness of neighboring tribes, etc. I don't think you can generalize on the happiness of all hunter gatherers.

Sure, in a nasty, brutish and short way, I can totally envision quality of life to be better "in the good old days".

Or was your comment meant to be snark that I didn't get?

It's not snarky. People who seem to me to be qualified and serious have suggested both that the initial converts to agriculture were less healthy and happy than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries, and that modern humans are less happy than hunter-gatherers. The first claim seems very plausible to me, but the second claim seems less so.

> the initial converts to agriculture were less healthy and happy

Land ownership and class separation didn't start until agriculture.

suprising observation from an intro anthropology course i took in college: when you add up all the time it takes you to feed yourself now (including time spent working to earn money etc) vs then, most people spent much less time per week back then. granted, this might not be true for the typical software engineer. but maybe if you somehow account for the years that it took to acquire the skills, it might be close...?

> Or was your comment meant to be snark that I didn't get?

Nope, just reporting what I read. It was on the interwebs ...

No one was there at that time, no one will truly know if this is true. I don't even think that we can compare the happiness between two people (I am happy doing things other find horrible like programming), so two people from different time ? Impossible in my opinion.

If I were going to expound from imagination about how remotely ancient peoples lived, I would prefer to really exercise the imagination and give them magical powers. Might as well have fun with it.

There are still hunter-gatherer groups existing today, and their happiness levels can be studied. I wonder how their level of snark compares to more modern societies.