From what I understand a key difference from then to now were short term stressors that appeared solvable by direct (group-) action as opposed to modern day long term stressors that can appear abstract and outside of our own radius of action, resulting in paralysis and psychological/physiological harm over long periods of time.

Don't have a source on hand though, may have come from a book by Robert Sapolsky

Why zebras don’t get ulcers!

for anyone unaware, this is a book by Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Zebras_Don%27t_Get_Ulcers

The book is about stress and the impact of glucocorticoids on the body. The chemical stress response used in "the wild" by animals is actually the same as the stress response we have when worrying about losing our job, not being able to complete a paper for school, dealing with poverty, etc. It's a partial explanation for why modern humans have so many chronic diseases that are rarely seen in other animals (or even archeological/anthropological evidence of non-industrial societies but he doesn't really go there much in the book)

I also highly recommend Sapolsky's Human Behavior Biology course which he taught for Stanford but published on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

Sure but we’ve always known about dying, the ultimate insolvable problem.

Sort of. Now your cortisol could spike because of all kinds of things, none of which you can SEE. That's usually called anxiety. Back thousands of generations ago, if you were high on a rock by your cave with a good view, you knew you were safe.

Carrying this forward, we humans will have to work on better systems, because it's about to get worse/weirder. Our brains aren't designed to be good at detecting lies visually -- we have mental processes for speech, but visually, what you saw was always real. Now with AI in the mix, it's gonna get... messy.

>if you were high on a rock by your cave with a good view, you knew you were safe.

But you also knew that you had to go on the hunt again tomorrow.

So do you: it’s called a job.

And you still have to worry about traffic/accidents, performing well, getting fired or laid off, getting berated by customers/clients/bosses, plus any number of additional anxiety-inducing events.

Most of us would probably still take that trade, though: at least sitting all day kills you slowly relative to a mountain lion.

Hunt? More likely gathering.

There's an interesting question whether it makes a difference that as human societies have modernized (through the agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions) the causes of stress have become progressively more detached from physical or existential adversity and the physical stress related to those threats (adrenaline, exertion, starvation, etc).

short term stress vs. cronic stress

if you can, read Sapolsky's book about it "Why zebras don't get ulcers"

They lived an average of how long? Enough to have kids at age 18-20, and help their kids raise their own for 2-5 years when they reached that same age. Evolution didn't equip us to live much longer than that.

> They lived an average of how long?

If they made it to at least 15, then probably on average somewhere between the 40s and late 50s from estimates I’ve seen.

(1,000 generations being probably < 30kya; there appears to have been a fairly radical expandsion in lifespan around 30kya, before that most estimates I've seen would have adults, by thrbsame definition, averaging sonewhere in the mid-30s or so.)

> Enough to have kids at age 18-20, and help their kids raise their own for 2-5 years when they reached that same age. Evolution didn't equip us to live much longer than that.

Huh? Humans can live upwards of 3 generations worth of humans. It's not uncommon for humans to remain functional enough to raise their grandchildren!

Who is to say that our ancestors coped with stressors? Evolution doesn't care about much other than your ability to reproduce.

Peter Attia has an interview with Robert Sapolsky that was recently “rebroadcasted” - “ The impact of stress on our physical and emotional health” [1]

Highly recommended listening.

As a neuroendocrinology researcher, much Robert Sapolsky’s life work revolves around the questions your pondering on. He has spent years studying wild baboons in Kenya, “ .. specifically, Sapolsky studies the cortisol levels between the alpha male and female and the subordinates to determine stress level.” [2]

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky

> What were the cortisol levels like for that average homo sapiens?

Much much lower actually. We use the same stress response for seeing a lion that we do to stress about making a mortgage payment. That's why we get ulcers and zebras don't

On top of that Homo sapiens also just had much more freetime and the median lifespans were actually not too far off from what they are today (~72 years[0]). Yes there was a huge dip in lifespans in (some) agricultural societies and when the industrial revolution started and there's definitely a lot of variation in difficulties faced but overall on average prehistoric peoples were healthier and much less stressed out than the average American is today. Also peoples that lived on islands and certain other ecosystems didn't really have to deal with predators at all. Predators are very unlikely to be the biggest source of stress in general as even the most dangerous of all predators, big cats, are very unlikely to attack a group of humans. As long as you're with your tribe you generally don't have much to fear.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...

ulcers are not caused by stress rather h pylori.

> I wonder if the security from communal living played a very important role

You... wonder? It's a well known fact that tribal societies are hypersocial. Rugged individualism and loneliness are very modern things.