TW: Look up any pics online of people actually on the brink of starvation, and you will immediately see how inaccurate a description this is for a way of life that was dominant for the vast majority of time modern humans have been wandering the planet.

- Agriculture: 10,000 years ago - Hunter-gatherers: 200,000 years ago

Starvation was the extreme end, constant malnutrition the norm rather than the exception so.

And yes, that is a constant threat for the few true hunter-hatherer societies still left. Or why do you think they are so few in number? Hint, it is not an abundance of food.

> constant malnutrition the norm rather than the exception so

it was not an easy life, for sure. but, "constant malnutrition" is also incorrect.

That's not what, e.g., tooth and bone samples tell us. Those tell us that everyone from this period, and as far as the early mosern / renessaince period, went through multiple periods of being under nourished, aka suffering hunger, during their lifetimes.

> it was not an easy life, for sure.

Then it wasn't play.

I didn't say it was continual hard times, did I? I just said it wasn't easy.

Is “constant malnutrition” the norm for animals living in the wild? Is the average lion or grizzly malnourished? Even in pre-history, humans were already the most effective predators on the planet, and megafauna were more plentiful then.

The average lion is dead. Starvation is an extremely common cause of death in the wild. Nearly every animal dies either directly from starvation, injury in an attempt at gaining food, or predation (which of course is something else trying to gain food). 50% of lion cubs die due to starvation in their first year alone. When you see healthy lions in their prime, you're only seeing the winners.

Similarly in hunter gatherer societies you don't see many malnourished individuals, you see graves.

Comparing the average life span of wild animals and their brethren living lives at Zoos, pets or otherwise protected enviroments allowing them to die of old age, I'd say yes.

animals living in zoos actually tend to die younger than their counterparts in the wild so you have basically made their point for them

it also suggests that we in modern society are basically domesticated/in a zoo compared with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, which doesn't really sound like the better option to me

> Is “constant malnutrition” the norm for animals living in the wild?

No, but struggle is.

I suspect it's people confusing individuals with the species. The individual suffered, the species survived and evolved... eventually, we still have a long way to go.

> Starvation was the extreme end, constant malnutrition the norm rather than the exception so.

And now we're bringing that back with the lack of money causing the exact same thing, though IMO it's more offensive because the food needed to resolve the problem is literally right in front of the starving people, they just can't have it because they have earned insufficient value credit.

Or, if they have enough for it, they can have nutrient-void shaped corn "food" that their bodies can't process and will make them fat while also simultaneously not actually sustaining them and leaving them even worse off by some measures.

People are dying from excess calories in the West, they are absolutely not starving to death en masse.

Man does not live by calories alone. Calorie-dense nutrient-void food causes obesity and also starves the afflicted body of necessary vitamins, proteins and the like.

> Or why do you think they are so few in number?

Missionaries and colonisers, at least that was the case in this part of the world.

Before M&C hunter-gatherers were everywhere: https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

Afterwards, not so much.

People on the brink of starvation are not actually starving. So they look and are pretty healthy.

The US, where 'normal' weight is classified as starvation. People are so huge that any thin person must be starving, or anorexic.

US - "Look at the poor natives starving"

Native - "What, we're just healthy"

> The part of hunter-gatherer societies being at the brink of starvation more often than not?

That's the wrong part. I believe there's no known history of famine in hunter-gatherers. That only really became a thing with agriculture.

Hunter-gatherer populations were small; there was plenty of food generally speaking. Which is why relatively so little time had to be spent acquiring it, in comparison with the back-breaking worth of agriculture.

Of course, once agriculture started using up all the land that was previously being used for hunting and gathering, well then hunting and gathering was no longer viable. But that was something new with the introduction of agriculture.

As I said elsewhere, tooth samples and bones from those periods tell a different story, namely famine, or serious malnitrition, happening frequently.

"Hunter–gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists" -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/

"Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter–gatherers actually had significantly less -- not more -- famine than other subsistence modes."

There is no sepcific time frame mentioned in the paper, the closest thing I saw was the NASA satelite data from the early 2000s. And that period in time can hardly be uses to draw conclusions about HG and agriculturalist lifestyles throughout history.

i have no beef in this argument, except to note that if one wants to study hunter-gatherer societies, one does not dig three rotten sticks from the ground and wildly extrapolates some cockamamy just-so story about the lives of that society that is 90% a reflection of the biases and pieties of the bureaucracy that is funding ones work. instead, one buys a ticket to Port Moresby, and hauls ones ass into the mountains on the horizon.

carry on.

"closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun"

As in dying of malnutrition? Of course it was. Or injuries, diseases...

Pardon my word play on applying the word "play" to a society that constantly faced severe consequences of literal hunger...

If saving people from malnutrition is your concern, good news; it’s still a problem today.

Perhaps we could all spend less time generating empty rhetoric online and more time engaged in what we claim to be via logic, our real concerns

It feels really disingenuous when all the pearl clutching office workers go home to video games not a soup kitchen. Spend their weekends hiking not nursing the sick, fixing poorer people’s homes.

Modern day infantilized office worker crowd is the most off putting group of people I’ve ever encountered.

Saving people from malnutrition, hunger, violence and war are noble goals. They have nothing to do with discussing, and assessing, the situation in pre-historical times or the live of tribes living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to this day.

Genius of the highest order

Is that an insult, a compliment or both? I seriously cannot tell.

Good stay in that superposition forever. I’ve come to conclude this forum is a waste of my time.

Never saved random string I set password to and am logging off now

Fair enough, I guess?

But it's true. Life WAS like that back then.