The archaeological record shows that tooth decay increased dramatically with agriculture, and prior to that, was much less frequent than today. It's one step forward, two steps back - at least, for dentistry.

Many of our dramatically beneficial advances - such as covered sewage and vitamin-supplemented bread - solve problems that did not exist for less densely populated hunter-gatherers.

The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age.

EDIT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel EDIT2 I'm saying pre-agriculture people had/have better teeth and gums than you do now.

Don't forget the other major problem that civilization solved really well: infant mortality. (Unless you take the Malthusian perspective and see it as a boon to population management.)

The interesting thing here is that we have no idea if they have also solved infant mortality, but in a different way.

They've been around for so long, it's likely that they've solved some of the problems we have in unique ways.

OK, nobody disputes that they have better teeth than my circa 1800 ancestors did, but I very likely have better teeth than they do now, so who really wins here?

> The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age.

This is a point I wish I had made.

I get your point, and I think we can all agree that our standards of living are WAY better than theirs, but by OUR standards. Yes, our life expectancy is better, we have better teeth, we are healthier, we get to use all the shiny stuff that comes with our civilization. But those are our standards, not theirs. So there's no 'winner' here.

Look at native Americans. They were also 'savages', and we didn't do very well imposing our superior western civilization upon them. That kind of thinking is old-fashioned and harmful. We can't just assume that our culture, civilization is somehow 'better'. Of course, I wouldn't like living the way they do, but given the ferocity of their defense against others, this goes the same for them.

They seem to live their lives essentially worry-free and they take care of each other. There are records of elderly population.

They seem to like it the way they have it and seeing that their neighbouring tribesmen were either massacred or suffered extremely lethal epidemics, they seem to have achieved the most evolutionarily intelligent behaviour of the region by keeping strangers the fuck away from their island.

> But those are our standards, not theirs

I think it is fair to assume that health and life are universal standards. I'm willing to bet on in.

Maybe it depends whether you look at it from a collective or individual point of view? Individually we are probably healthier, but as a population they well may be healthier since infirmity is naturally eliminated by death. That sounds pretty bad, but it might not be bad if they have a different, more accepting, view of death than us.

What does this even mean? Talking in platitudes about health and life are all fine and dandy, and yet the in US there are tremendous issues with poverty, health care access, and control of one's own body. Societies do things very differently even if they say they promote life or health, but that kind if wishy washy dialog is useless, what matters are the details.

> Talking in platitudes about health and life are all fine and dandy, and yet the in US there are tremendous issues with poverty, health care access, and control of one's own body.

I think health care access is an even greater problem on that island.

Perhaps age is a universal standard and therefore health and life can be associated to it.

On the other hand, if our contact wipes out a share of their population, it reduces their life expectancy. Furthermore, they survived the 2004 Tsunami, so possibly they are doing better than others in the region.

If an asteroid hits the Earth, who do you think will be best equipped to survive? Pretty sure whoever dies in that circumstance is the loser.

I'm sure the dinosaurs were happy by their standards as well, but they're basically irrelevant now.

> If an asteroid hits the Earth, who do you think will be best equipped to survive?

Them, obviously. You and I would die a painful death in a few days without sanitation, proper housing and supermarkets. They on the other hand, are perfectly used to manage with extremely scarce resources.

Er... no. We would have a better chance of deflecting the asteroid if our technology is sufficiently advanced. Therefore, technological progress is objectively superior for survival.

But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine.

It's clear they know the outside world exists. They have chosen not to engage. (To put it mildly.)

As an aside, there are more than 100 'uncontacted' tribes in the world. All of them know of the outside world; all have chosen -- for now -- not to interact directly with mainstream society.

I'm not sure you have much choice when you are born in such a society. You are probably very much expected/forced to stay and be useful to your tribe. Freedom is very relative...

> But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine.

How much do they really know, though? Do they know that some of their diseases could be cured, for example?

I've been fortunate enough to interview several tribal people who were only recently 'contacted'. The latest came out of the forest in 2009.

What is striking is how many of their friends and relatives died of outsiders' disease after making contact, and how fondly they spoke of their life before. When I spoke to them, some were considering leaving the village where they now live and returning to a life in the forest.

With regards to healthcare -- the health services offered to settled tribal and indigenous people in many places is poor to nonexistent. Amazonian tribal peoples have dozens to hundreds of medicinal plants, many of which have been proven to have active pharmacological properties. Some are now used in Western medicine.

But then, some of the plants in the jungle seem to be amazing. I read some books about expeditions to find them for western medicine. One talked about a black paste you put on a tooth and it will simply fall out, no pain and no problem. A plant that makes women infertile for 7 years (they give it to their teenagers, apparently). Also, great plants against many sorts of other problems like abscesses.

Sadly, the results simply got ignored. The woman in the book was sent by a US pharmy company and brought back many plants and samples which she had won from the tribes in hard work (they don't just tell anyone). They probably still have them in a freezer somewhere.

An experienced person I talked to said that it probably was too much trouble and costs to clear it for drugs since there often are side effects, often psychological. He took one or two of the jungle things and said it was intense. Still, it's a great loss for our civilisation that it played out like this so far.

So, we'd have much to give, but also much to gain. Our diseases could be cured too.

Plants are limited resources. Even if you wanted to make drugs out of it, it does not scale very well. That's why most of our drugs are synthetic. That's scalable chemistry. Analyzing active ingredients in plants is a lengthy and costly process. And even if they worked as advertised, you would need to go through clinical trials to have them accepted in other countries. You don't put drugs on the market just like that.

Net, it's very costly and it's been tried before, as far as I know, on several plants from the Amazon area. I need to find the source again, but from what I remember most plants failed against placebo. There's probably a lot of placebo effect in the efficacy claimed by people living in these areas.

None of those plants sound real. Sorry to burst your bubble.

I agree. The claim should still be checked, IMHO. You didn't reach my bubble yet..

As compared to the Civilized Man, who has only solidly developed all the things you describe in the last couple hundred years and took thousands of years of war, famine, plague, slavery, and endless grinding inequality (still haven't quite fixed that one it seems) to get where we are now?

Nothing quite like the modern man, where some tiny percentage of the world enjoys all its fruits and a few billion others try to live on subsistence farming, which by most anthropological analysis is a much worse life that the hunter/gatherer tribes of 10,000 years past.

> a few billion others try to live on subsistence farming

There has never been as few famines as in today's world. I'm not sure what you are referring to. And expect for a few countries, life expectancy around the world as well as life standards are increasing progressively. As posted several times on HN, the future is about abundance, not poverty. Even people in Africa nowadays have mobile phones everywhere. Take your blinkers off.

Subsistence farming isn't a reference to famines, its a reference to inequality. My point was that even today, the majority of the civilized world spends their time doing endless agricultural labor for minimal benefit, even though one would think that we would have a better alternative implemented by this point (especially since anthro studies have shown that by and large hunter/gatherer societies spend much less time obtaining food and water than farming ones do).

And my earlier point on famine was that it was a much bigger problem for heavy agricultural societies in centuries past than it was for tribal societies; a bad harvest one year for a civilization could have disastrous effects, while a tribe could generally pack up and move.

And finally, while I agree that the future is abundance, I'm not convinced it's going to be abundance for everyone. Up to this point, wealth in every single civilization I can think of has been heavily stratified, with the top few percent taking the majority of everything (doesn't matter if its nobles, priests, corporate leaders or politicians). I don't really see this changing given our current political/cultural/economic systems, unless basic income becomes a thing (and even then, the stratification will remain; it'll just become irrelevant on a long enough scale of technological improvement).

You focus on the wrong thing. It's not about inequality, it's obvious that the rich should get richer faster. You don't expect the rich to have a 1 dollar salary increase while the poor gets the same thing. Obviously not. So, of course the gap is widening. And it's not necessarily a problem, because even the super rich can't spend all of what they earn, and that money ends up being recycled in the economy (investment, etc..).

It's rather about: is everyone getting richer ? And the answer is clearly yes. Even the poorer people are getting a bit more than before and can afford a better life than their parents. There is a clear progress in all strats of society. That's what abundance mean: it's not about who gets the biggest share of the cake, it's the fact that cake is growing and everyone gets more cake than before.

> It's not about inequality, it's obvious that the rich should get richer faster.

That the rich get richer faster and hoard more and more wealth while others fine their wealth decreasing over time is inequality.

> And it's not necessarily a problem, because even the super rich can't spend all of what they earn, and that money ends up being recycled in the economy (investment, etc..).

This is the trickle down theory, which is not true in any way whatsoever. Wealth does not get reinvested or redistributed in a way that reduces wealth disparity.

> It's rather about: is everyone getting richer ? And the answer is clearly yes.

This is demonstrably false. Don't confuse the availability of consumer goods with wealth. In the US, for example, actual wealth for low and middle class people/families has been declining for the last 30 years or so.

> Even the poorer people are getting a bit more than before and can afford a better life than their parents.

This is not true either. Homelessness, poverty, and unemployment rates are measured and we know that there is no long term downward trend for these things even as wealth disparity gets worse.

> That's what abundance mean: it's not about who gets the biggest share of the cake, it's the fact that cake is growing and everyone gets more cake than before.

Tell that to the people that are homeless or go hungry every day.

I've heard multiple references of the world wide poverty rate dropping by half in the last 20 years, here's a summary.

http://finallygoodnews.net/2013/06/20/half-way-there-world-w...

and the original article

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

The article talks about reductions in extreme poverty, that is living on less than $1.25 a day. Note that doesn't really address wealth disparity, only that more people, esp. in China, are living with higher income.

However, this change doesn't make any statements about increasing equality for different economic classes nor does it talk about sustainability of a lowering extreme poverty rate. It also doesn't talk about various aspects about living just above that extreme poverty line or the challenge facing those people not living in places like China that have seen a big economic boom and are not likely to.

Still it's nice to know that at least people in extreme poverty are having their numbers decreased so drastically.

What?! It's all about inequality. The problem isn't everyone is getting richer it's that some are getting waaaay richer than other, they are grabbing the powers, making decisions and isolating themselves from the consequences of those decisions.

You can drain a lake for thing X until your lake runs dry. Who is least susceptible to change? Those with money . Either they move or they buy water).

The high Gini coefficient correlates and probably causes so many bad effects it shouldn't be ignored. It's not the one and only measure, and there are other important measures but it is a very good predictor of social unrest.

Not much social unrest in the past 50 years in all developed countries where inequalities have been growing when everyone gets richer.

And wealth is not a Lake. It does not run dry. You can create wealth. If wealth could not be created we would be super poor by now with 7 billion people on the planet compared to 100 years ago. But it's the exact opposite, we are hundred time richer than 100 years ago.

When everyone earns a little more than before over time, there's not so much cause for social unrest. Countries with growing economies tend to be more stable and peaceful Revolutions occur when people get poorer and lose hope for a better future.

Not much unrest? That claim seems dubious. What are your standards for not much unrest?

I never said it is a like a lake. I meant an actual lake. Lake was example how inequalities lead to richest people making policies that don't impact them. That is the biggest threat income inequality may present to any society.

Money is like gravity/mass. The more money you have the more money you attract. You may create wealth, but if you don't distribute it, some points may gather too much like their matter counterparts, turn into a black holes and consume the reality around them. It's like that man that asked Ford "If you don't give money to your workers, who's gonna buy your cars?"

> Countries with growing economies tend to be more stable and peaceful Revolutions occur when people get poorer and lose hope for a better future.

Wait, what about Brazil and Turkey? Aren't they growing economies? Why are their in state of unrest?

Notice the "tend to" != "are". Obviously there are other factors at work. But statistically speaking, or as a rule of thumb, growing economies are clearly leading to more stable countries.

Notice I said a similar thing. Gini coefficient correlates with lower life expectancy, more tensions, etc. I think it is a better predictor of peace and overall quality value, than growing economies.

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

> thousands of years of war, famine, plague, slavery, and endless grinding inequality (still haven't quite fixed that one it seems) to get where we are now?

Are you trying to tell me that these "noble savages" didn't have war, didn't have famine or inequality?

Tribal warfare was usually a matter of establishing boundaries. If I remember my history correctly, this was pretty clearly demonstrated in battles between Native Americans and European colonists in the 16 and 1700s. Tribal attacks were closer to raids - warriors would fight, some people would die, but damage on a lasting scale was minimal. Colonist attacks, on the other hand, were going to war in the civilized measure of the term; burning down villages/towns, significantly more death, etc.

And as technology has advanced and civilizations have grown in size and strength, our conception of war has grown ever more brutal. Its been shown, for example, that troops at the time of the revolutionary war that fired on each other by and large missed - troops would load gunpowder but not the bullet; they would aim over the heads of the opposing troop at the last second; and so on. Something like 20 or 30 percent of the troops would actually be shooting at their opponents.

When this was discovered (I think in the early 1900s, but I don't really remember - could be as late as the 40s?) armies changed training methods; they would use targets closer to the shape of humans and so on, and there was a massive increase in the accuracy of soldiers using guns. There was also the advent of "total war" during the American Civil War, with the previously unheard-of scale of destruction that brought (which we now consider typical).

In short, "war" is a wildly different thing for two tribes of a few hundred people that have several hundred sq. miles of territory each (and no strong reason to invade the other), and two civilizations deploying thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops, with vastly more lethal weapons, to fight each other.

Famine is also less of an issue for a hunter/gatherer tribe; the large expanse of territory means that if one area is temporarily exhausted, you move somewhere else, or you follow the herds, etc.

Lastly, inequality doesn't seem to exist as a problem for most tribal societies. I mean, imagine living with a few hundred other people that are all you know - and are all you will ever know? People will go to great lengths to help their friends and family in our society; is it so strange to think that in a group where everyone knows each other and everyone works, lives and plays together, that the group will naturally enforce some sort of equilibrium between its members? That people will share and help each other based more on their capabilities and the expectations of others?

Further, we can see that stratification and inequality are endless problems for civilized societies - war, rebellion and revolts are constant themes throughout civilized history, often between the "haves" and the "have nots". These problems exist because civilization is an attempt to create human societies at scale - except humans aren't built for social structures beyond a few hundred people, and we have yet to find a way to replace that default social construct with something that works for tens of thousands or millions or billions of people.

"War" is also a wildly different prospect for a society in which a person cannot be considered a man until he has ambushed and killed a random stranger from another tribe and fashioned their body parts into a trophy, to a society so accustomed to peace it requires ever-more-complex rationalizations to breach it, having invented Geneva conventions, treaties and the concept of being "humane" along the way. At the end, you're just as dead whether killed by the ruthless efficiency of an atomic bomb or a Holocaust in a protracted as you are if ambushed by a lone member of another tribe that's just moved into your area.

Let's put things into perspective: a tribe lives in total isolation from the rest of the world for 65000 years, eating an abundance of fish, and the most advanced technology they develop over that time is weapons, which they default to brandishing at the first sign of any outsiders or unexplained phenomenon. That's hardly a great advertisement for the ability of their simpler social structures and lack of external threats to yield peace and harmony.

They may well have good reasons for being hostile to outsiders. Imagine 400 years ago they were friendly and approachable, but after a succession of whalers, slavers, British kidnappers and who knows what else, quickly came to the rational conclusion that outsiders are hostile and must be fought off.

It would be more accurate to say that it is not a great advertisement for our more complex social structures to yield harmony.

You are depicting war among tribes as being a lesser evil than the ones carried among nations. It would be better to compare the tribes' war with clashes among Eurasian ancient cities and later among medieval houses, in which "warriors would fight, some people would die, but damage on a lasting scale was minimal" would be valid for both. That kind of war was carried for thousands of year, and comparatively only little time-span holds the "total war" style.

You are also speculating about tribal social environment. For the most part of human history, the main factor for establishing relations was power enforced through violence. The size of the community didn't matter much, we have domestic violence even now. That "sort of equilibrium between its members" was/is assured most likely by brute force or its projection.

Yeah? And who's going to pay for all their modern antibiotics, dentistry, surgery, and preventative medicine? I'm no expert on native/Western interactions but it's my understanding that typically the native population nose dives because of new diseases and those that survive are left to try and make money in a new, grander system of society which is completely different from what they've done for generations prior.

Right now they have a way of life in which food is plentiful; they want fruit they pull it from a tree, they want fish they reach into their lagoon. I'm sure they have their share of injuries and sickness but is it really worth trading their current life away for? And what will they replace it with? Over-harvesting their food sources to sell away? Performing their rituals for gawking tourists until the very acts are meaningless? Being exposed to a slew of diseases they've never had to worry about before only to find out that our modern antibiotics cost too much for their measly incomes?

Regardless of how they've done it these people have survived for what... 65,000 years? I don't think they need anything we have to offer. Meanwhile look at how nearly every other native population has fared after coming into contact with Westerners. Sure our society has plenty of great aspects and advantages to it but these things come with a cost. I don't think it's possible for our modern world to mesh with the Sentinelese without totally destroying their way of life if not a majority of their population.

I now find myself wishing I'd read the copy of "The Coral Sea" by Alan Villiers which is sitting on my bookshelf at home. From my understanding it's a book, published some 50 or 60 years ago, chronicling the history of various Pacific Islands and how Western exploration and exploitation have effected them. The general synopsis from what I've read elsewhere has been that they haven't fared too well.

Well, they seem to be doing allright for the past 65,000 years...

I'm the first to admit that I probably wouldn't last a week there. It seems quite romantic, living on a deserted island, without the antics of our society. But gathering food and water is hard, or even near impossible for us. These people however, seem to have found a way to survive.

I'm assuming that, because they have lived in such a closed ecosystem for so long, they have different diseases than we have. I'm also assuming that for the diseases and medical conditions they have, they probably can find medicinal plants in the forest.

I doubt however they have the same life expectancy as we do!

> Well, they seem to be doing allright for the past 65,000 years...

They've survived. Humans can survive terrible things.

> I'm assuming that, because they have lived in such a closed ecosystem for so long, they have different diseases than we have.

Not really, because their ecosystem is not closed. Birds and fish and so on still bring parasites, insects fly around, and malaria is malaria wherever you go.

> I'm also assuming that for the diseases and medical conditions they have, they probably can find medicinal plants in the forest.

But not good ones. We've never once found plants which make anything nearly as good as penicillin, and there's no reason to expect that we ever will.

> I doubt however they have the same life expectancy as we do!

And they may well have to practice infanticide, and/or go on bloody campaigns to keep the population down low enough they don't starve.

Penicillin is made by mold. I'm not sure if molds count as plants, but it's definitely not a synthetic substance.

Yes and no. It's not synthetic, but it's not naturally occurring, either (at least, not at levels that are useful). A lot of work went into the production process before penicillin actually became viable as an antibiotic (hence the 16-year gap between discovery and first wide scale use):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production

> And they may well have to practice infanticide, and/or go on bloody campaigns to keep the population down low enough they don't starve.

Looking at their advanced weapon technology I would guess that they are very warlike, and have regular tribal wars.

Just to pick one example, ancient people actually had very good teeth:

http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/ancestors-had-much...

I suggest you read the following link.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069163

Especially the answer to "But could this be because they don’t see the benefits of ‘our’ way of life? If they knew, might they want to join us?"

what makes you think they would be rich enough for any of those? as other posts point out - they aren't going to be automatically promoted to middle class americans in the burbs.