The past was not that cute

Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world; and no factory farming that incubates most of these diseases.

Regarding your reference to how brutal and never-ending work was; As far as we know, many European medieval farmers had 1500-1800 working hours per year. It’s also a bit gloomy to assume the household was run by two parents and their kids - often, grandparents were colocated and helped until they couldn’t. What you‘ve described was certainly the case during famines and war, but not a permanent state.

insects, predator animals, cuts+bacteria all seem like quite hard-to-avoid disease vectors. we can spread disease quickly these days, but there are no shortage of ancient diseases you could've come across in a small hunter-gatherer society

I believe the modern world creates a lot of mental health problems, loneliness, and unhappines, but it's absolutely physically safer and more survivable (and more comfortable) for a huge percentage of the developed world. (It creates those mental problems unnecessarily, given the level of technology we have, but deeply baked into our fairly-antisocial individualistic culture)

>Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world.

There’s plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt, water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it’s not very hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit in the wild.

>factory farms

Didn’t need factory farms for smallpox. Many animals live in large herds, which were larger in the past. If you read accounts from the 18th and early 19th century there are many reports of squirrel migrations involving hundreds of millions of squirrels in relatively small areas.

Parent specifically called out antibiotics, which are for bacterial infections, not diseases. Coupled with the increased number of things to step on or get cut by means you really need them.

Small pox was way after hunter gatherer times, so I‘m not sure what point you are making. Huge farms were a thing even in medieval times, with hundreds of animals.

I‘m not sure I agree on your second point. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and others are endemic to the developed world. My personal opinion here is that constant oversupply with calories is not something humans have been able to adapt to, yet.

We just live longer than back then and have way more opportunities to see these (mostly) late-life diseases. Same with cancer.

Yes, average life span was shorter back then because of child mortality. But the vast majority of surviving adults never reached age 80. Old age was 60-70 and many of these diseases only occur at 70+ in significant numbers.

> There’s plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt, water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it’s not very hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit in the wild.

An hunter-gathers were probably a lot more robust to that than modern people.

Think about it: if what you say were that big of an issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out before getting to us.

"Way after" is quite an overstatement. Smallpox is as old as agriculture. Most seem to agree that it was the transition into agrarian life that provided the necessary conditions for it to emerge, but it did so right as that transition took place.

>Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world

Traded neolithic goods regularly crossed continents. If an axe head can cross the continent then so can a microscopic disease.

Hunter-gatherers didn't have birth control; if you have 5 kids and half of them die, you've still maintained your population.

But as the parent comment suggests, if the adults were getting sick it is unlikely that they would be able to:

* Produce 5 kids in the first place.

* Take care of the kids that they were able to produce, making survival of even half them much less likely.

But in actuality, best we are able to determine hunter-gathers who made it into adulthood lived longer, healthier lives than those in agrarian lifestyles.

You definitely don't automatically need antibiotics for something you step on, or get cut. Any topical antiseptic will do, and probably perform better.

What you say is only half true. I’m also thinking of injuries caused by animals and other people. Antiseptic isn’t going to fix the nasty kind of infections deep bite or knife wounds cause. A hunter gatherer society is definitely at greater risk of suffering these kinds of injuries than we are.

And also, even antiseptic treatment was in shorter supply than it is today, so it’s still a moot point.

They were getting sick and died more often than us, but still enough survived to keep the population alive. There's no contradiction.

I admit they probably had a stronger immunologic system on average, by virtue of relying on it and "exercising" more often. Alternatively, people prone to getting sick just died early.

The adults getting sick and being undernourished was one of the leading causes of infant mortality.

There's sufficient evidence that hunter gatherer societies have indeed used various plant- and animal based antiseptics (honey, oils, tannins, resins, fungi,...) to treat wounds.

> Take care of the kids that they were able to produce, making survival of even half them much less likely.

H-G societies tend to be smaller groups where everyone in the village helps with childcare, so if a parent was out of action for a while the children could still be gathered.

This is covered in the book Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff, specifically with the Hadzabe people (Tanzania).

Humanity almost did die out. All living humans are descendants from a relatively small funnel.

My point is that factory farms aren’t a requirement for zoonotic viruses. Smallpox also predates the medieval period by thousands of years.

We also know that there are viral epidemics in animals that live in solitary animals and animals that live in groups smaller than the size of hunter gatherer tribes.

It's likely that was due to catastrophic events, and not general resilience. If a big meteor hits earth now, we'll likely by at a population of a few k or 10k as well.

There’s no reason to assume that. Antibiotics and anti-parasitic drugs have only been around for a century or so. That’s not enough time for our immune systems to have lost the ability to fight them.

>Think about it: if what you say were that big of an issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out before getting to us.

Most wild animals are riddled with parasites and it’s common for for animals in captivity to have 2x the lifespan of their wild counterparts.

You don’t need to make it to 70 to raise children. If 50% of people make it to 30 and each person has an average of 5 kids the math works out fine for population growth.

I said shorter supply than today, not totally unavailable. Pre-agrarian societies, by definition, were not growing and harvesting antiseptics in bulk. They’d not do much against an infection from a stab wound (yes, non-agrarian societies encountered, fought and killed each other).

The immune response to diseases has to be developed over time, not to mention the fact that the introduction of those drugs drastically accelerated the evolution of the bacteria, viruses, etc. I can't speculate as to the health of hunter gatherer civilizations but modern diets and until recently the prevalence of antibacterial soaps and products in homes have definitely changed immune systems. Just look at covid, where in just a period of a few years the amount of infections due to other common diseases like influenza or strep have shot up due to kids not being exposed to germs during the lockdowns.

Disease can also be zoonotic. E.g. North America supposedly saw disease spread by wild pigs through the indigenous population before direct contact with colonizing Europeans.

> They were getting sick and died more often than us

The comparison was with agrarian societies that were found in parallel, not "us", which presumably implies something about modern medicine. Have I misinterpreted you?

> There's no contradiction.

Was there reason to think that there was...? It is not clear what you are trying to add here.

> The immune response to diseases has to be developed over time

The human immune system has both innate and acquired components. The innate systems are functionally the same between you and I or a hunter gatherer.

A hunter gatherer may have acquired immunity to viruses and bacteria that you or I haven’t been exposed to, but in most cases they would have become sick in the first place before they got that immunity. The majority of diseases don’t produce long lasting immunity. There’s a reason you get tetanus vaccines every 5-10 years.

We are also exposed to more pathogens than hunter gatherers not fewer because of the way we live. Plus we have vaccines, so if anything we have a more robust acquired immune system.

> introduction of those drugs drastically accelerated the evolution of the bacteria, viruses, etc.

Antibiotics accelerated the evolution of bacteria towards antibiotic resistance. Not towards greater virulence. Antibiotic resistance generally has a fitness penalty as well, so if anything modern bacteria would tend to be slightly less dangerous.

>antibacterial soap

Antibacterial soap can result in resistant bacteria and it also alters your bodies microbiome. Theres some evidence that it can make you more prone to autoimmune diseases, but no good evidence of a strong impact on your bodies ability to fight off diseases.

Certainly not to a level noticeable by an individual.

>look at Covid

The reason influenza infections went up was because people weren’t exposed to influenza, not because of lack of exposure to generic germs.

There weren’t more overall infections, they were just concentrated in time. If Covid hadn’t happened, those extra people who got the flu would have just gotten the flu earlier.