10,000 years ago, we were living in a pre-agricultural society (or, perhaps, only somewhat agricultural) Lots of wandering tribes, moving around following the food, hunting with sharp rocks. Hunger and starvation would be common, everything would be scarce, even for "kings" (which were really just tribal leaders) Modern construction wasn't a thing, dwellings were constructed out of sod, animal skins -- at the best, stacked rocks or mud bricks. As a king, you'd still have to do back-breaking, dangerous work to maintain your position and value in society.

There's no possibility of going to a homeless shelter to get out of the cold, or sleeping in a well-constructed subway station to shield yourself from the elements. If you were injured, you couldn't just walk into a nearby emergency room with a team of nurses and doctors required to treat you. No soup kitchens or food pantries or SNAP benefits. Even digging around in a city garbage can or restaurant dumpster would yield an easy and delicious feast compared to spending days tracking prey, killing it with a spear, cleaning and skinning it, and cooking it with primitive tools over a fire. I would much rather be homeless today than in any sort of position 10,000 years ago.

I know the work of Jared Diamond has some problems, but as a counterpoint:

"While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania...While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s."[1]

Obviously this isn't representative of all hunter-gatherer societies, but a >20 hour work week, high-protein 2000 calorie diet seems pretty nice. Of course there are some other nice benefits of modernity but saying being homeless in the US have a categorically higher quality of life is a stretch.

[1]http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

The homeless aren't hungry. The leading causes of death for the homeless aren't starvation or malnutrition -- it's drug abuse, cancer, and heart disease: http://pschousing.org/news/drug-overdose-1-cause-homeless-de... Sure, they're not the healthiest bunch in the world, and they have much shorter lifespans than the average non-homeless person, but they sure have a much longer lifespan than even the well-off did 10,000 years ago.

The homeless survive off the infrastructure of society, where food is relatively plentiful because of the massive commercial agricultural system we have in place. Not only is commercial agriculture in the US completely different than the small agriculture in rural Africa, that the Diamond essay is talking about, but the homeless aren't farmers! They're consumers of agriculture, but not producers of it. So, while I agree with the essay, and think it makes some interesting points, it's just not applicable to the homeless.

Also, the 20 hour week it mentioned is entirely devoted to obtaining food, and note that they say that's "during a month when food was plentiful" If the only work we did was for food, I'd only have to work one day a month!

While access to food, shelter, and other amenities we take for granted may be "insecure" for the homeless, they're still available. The homeless congregate in cities because that's where the food banks, homeless shelters, sources of sporadic income, public restrooms, and convenient places of shelter from the elements are. They have the ability (although, again, an inconsistent and insecure one) to be warm when it's snowing, receive medical care when they need it, eat a variety of food, and hang out in the library surfing the Internet during the day.

Thanks, I like this point of view. I guess something like ratio of modern day comforts / modern day stress vs that ratio from past could be a useful measure.

Houses, kilns, pottery, turquoise carvings, tools made from stone and bone, and bone flutes China [1]

I'll take living as a potter in 8000 BC China over being homeless in NYC today, thanks. I don't have to be the King.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8th_millennium_BC

This is an excellent explanation. Thank you!

It's amazing how much has changed in 10,000 years. I didn't have a good grasp on the timeline.

10,000 years ago we lived like animals, now, we live like pampered pets.

edit: note* this comment should be viewed through the "obesity pandemic" prism.

Not Manhattan, but I work in a ritzy part of downtown Chicago and see homeless people literally eating garbage from dumpsters now and again. Yeah, I think the richest kings of Europe were doing a little better than that.

I don't think the author understands what homelessness really looks like in dense urban areas and seems to have a Hollywood version of homelessness as his reference.

I don't think you understand what 10,000 years ago looks like. These weren't rich European kings, they were leaders of tribes on the cusp of discovering agriculture. In Europe, they lived in caves and tents and hunted with sharp rocks -- they arguably had it worse even than some of the other prehistoric groups in the Middle East and parts of Asia.

Eating freshly cooked meat from a domesticated or game animal is miles better than a rotting piece of garbage in a dumpster sitting in the hot sun.

I don't think we're understanding how filthy dumpsters are and how our bodies are not engineered to handle the types of bacteria that grow in those circumstances or just how dangerous and unhealthy urban areas are for the homeless. Even days old dried meat is going to be healthier, tastier, and safer to eat that whatever you find in a dumpster. Opening a dumpster and seeing a freshly cooked steak that has only one bite out of it is pure Hollywood bullshit. Its a major health risk to eat what you find in garbage cans. Hunting and gathering is infinitely better and safer.

You are romanticizing the hunter-gatherer past. Constantly being on the verge of starvation, eating under-ripe fruit, and scavenging rotten meat off week-old corpses was not a good or 'healthy' life.

You may be giving hunter-gatherers too little credit. I think erring on the opposite side of romanticizing is just as bad and risks dehumanizing them.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe

"Ian Hodder of Stanford University said, "Göbekli Tepe changes everything". It shows that the erection of monumental complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been previously assumed."

That doesn't look like the work of people perpetually on the verge of starvation.

Another example is from the contemporary historical accounts and depictions of early Europeans in North America. Plain Indians seemed to have been in very good health. They were taller, had a more varied diet, were in better physical shape, and enjoyed longer lives (save accidents/violence).

I'm not personally familiar with the anthropological evidence, but I strongly, strongly doubt that 'constant verge of starvation' accurately characterizes even a small percentage of the past reality.

Constant verge of starvation is a very accurate characterization of the reality of the past. Until the 20th century, economists almost universally used population growth and decline as a measure of agricultural (and overall) productivity, because people would have as many children as they could feed. This measure only works if you are on the verge of famine. A quick glance at anthropological evidence will show you that cultures which developed (and advanced) agriculture had much higher population densities; this was not a lifestyle choice, it was a sign that they could feed more people than the hunter-gatherers. Other resources (such as salt and water) also played a part in what population size could be supported, but efficiency of food production was the predominant occupation and concern up until very recently.

The hunter-gatherers were not awash in delicious artisanal wild venison jerky.

Exactly! I remember reading firsthand accounts from, even 150 years ago, in the US, like Little House on the Prairie, and they all seemed to think it was pretty normal to just "not have food" sometimes. Many many pages were devoted to discussing how long food would last, what they would do when food ran out, how fantastic it was that someone saved the day by killing a food, etc. And they weren't even poor by the standards and culture of the day! They had incredibly advanced (relatively speaking) technology, specialization, and societal support!

I've been downvoted a ton in this thread, but I just think there's so much delusion here about the lifestyle and living standards of prehistoric man...

Being on a constant verge of starvation has been very much the norm through most of history, which is attested by this list of major famines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

Bear in mind these are just the most famous famines, there were constant localised famines going on all the time.

Famines were certainly common and devastating. I recommend Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th Century: Volume 1:

"Famine recurred to insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man's biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar, even in Europe, despite its privileged position... It could not have been otherwise. Cereal yields were poor; two consecutive bad harvests spelt disaster... France, by any standards a privileged country, is reckoned to have experienced 10 general (nation-wide) famines during the tenth century: 26 in the 11th... 13 in the sixteenth; 11 in the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth."

"For when they are extreme, demographic increases lead to a deterioration in the standard of living; they enlarge the always horrifying total of the underfed, poor, and uprooted. A balance between mouths to be fed and the difficulties of feeding them, between manpower and jobs, is re-established by epidemics and famines... these extremely crude adjustments were the predominant feature of the centuries of the ancien régime."

Contrast this with Germany taking over a million migrants in during 2015, with none starving. How can agriculture be so much different now to be able to support something like this? Crop yields are much greater now due to artificial selection and technology:

"From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, the results were disappointing. For every grain sown, the harvest was usually no more than five and sometimes less. As the grain required for the next sowing had to be deducted, four grains were therefore produced for consumption from every one sown..." In Poland, Hungary and Slovakia between 1550 and 1650, yields were between 2 or 4 grains per 1! For 10% of Polish harvests, yields were below 2 to 1!

Things have improved greatly: England 1200-49: 3.7 for 1 England 1750-1820:

...10.6 grains for 1 planted!

And growth over the last century truly means we don't understand how drastically easier it is to grow food now. In Missouri, bushels per acre increased from about 10 in 1915 to about 55 in 2015! (src = http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/WheatYields_MO.jpg)

72 percent of the American workforce was in farming was 72 percent in 1820. (src = http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-...) Now it seems to be between 1-2 percent.

Agreed. In particular, the social support for physical/mental disabilities that often fuel homelessness was probably nonexistent then. And yes, it's fair to scoff at the social support when comparing nations among one another at the present. But the trend among all of them at present is light years ahead of what it was 10000 years ago.

Yeah, I can't see how that could possibly be true. Kings would have had access to huge amounts of man power. People to build their castles and supply them with food.

I suppose you could argue that the homeless person might have better access to healthcare. But I still think the author's statement is very false.

10ka ago there were no castles, only huts in which tiny communities of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers lived.

" Material standard of living can be seen in the increase of real incomes that would increase the purchasing power of consumers, and is characterized by the ability to consume goods and services. Non-material standard of living is more qualitative, and refers to the improvements in quality of life and the environment."

So (assuming that's the same definition they used) yeah, I guess the material standard of living is higher. Seems like that's ignoring quite a bit to sound really optimistic though.

I understand they are trying to make a distinction between "relative to others" vs. "by absolute measures," and how we are prone to thinking only in terms of the former, but I'd still argue they are indeed ignoring quite a bit. Using our exponential increases in GDP as a measure of comparison seems a bit irrelevant.

Both of those (material and environmental) fail to encompass fully other important aspects of a monarch's life, like power and sovereignty/independence, things which modern homeless certainly lack.

Well then, to be fair, they are not defining "homeless" as someone without an income. That's just my poor assumption. With that assumption, I have a hard time seeing how material standards do anything for someone without a home or income :)

So I'm not sure I agree with the original author but a modern homeless person can wander into a hospital emergency ward and get treated for a variety of diseases that would have killed a medieval king. Assuming we mean 1,000 years ago and not 10,000 years ago which may actually pre-date kings.

One of my favorite little know facts about how much has really changed with medical treatment...

Only 90 years ago, President Calvin Coolidge's 16 year old son died from a foot blister he got while playing lawn tennis on the White House grounds, something that would have probably been easily treated with an OTC anti-bacterial or a quick trip to the doctor nowadays.

We hardly have the get "medieval" to see the radical advancements in health and how we all greatly benefit from it.

Right. Just for contrast, Christopher Reeve (most famous "Superman"actor) died in 2004 of complications of a _bed sore_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reeve

...9 years after being thrown off of his horse and living as a quadriplegic, requiring a ventilator

I think more to the point Christopher Reeve lived for 9 years as a quadriplegic.

I'm equally confused. I wonder if he meant to say 10,000?

My understanding of human history pretty much stops at what we all learned about Egypt in history class, and that time period was ~6,000 years ago IIRC. I have no concept whatsoever of what life was like before then.

Were there even "kings" 10,000 years ago?

10,000 years ago suggests Mesopotamia. My weak history knowledge suggests that was the only thing closed to a civilization in that era.

Mesopotamia would have had farming [0], but if you consider the requirements just a group of people, I think there were settlements of sorts back well into the paleolithic. but not kings-with-castles-and-princesses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

Yes, Sumeria and Mesopotamia is basically the oldest recorded history we have, but this way predates what we know about that. The author is talking about what we know from archaeological evidence, not recorded history.

I think a better starting point would be the definition of standard of living.

They don't have to eat rotten meat, for example.

The wealthiest kings probably didn't have to either.

10,000 years is too much to make a valid comparison. Do we even know how kings lived that far back?