Natural Humanity

[tumorhead]

My head is permenantly screwed up.

Recently I listened to Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality Unlike other self-help or editoral books on the subject, this one focuses on the science first and foremost. And while it is indeed full of sex, it is even more eye-opening and informative, possibly more so, in its description of

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[tumorhead]

The book does spend a lot of time dismantling the idea that paleolithic life was "short, cruel, and brutish" if you want to read more.

A lot of averages of age in various eras include number of infant deaths, which extremely reduce the average apparent life span to like 30/40 years because lots of dead babies. Reality is that once you survived past childhood you had a good chance most places to live long most places and time periods. There are of course cases where a low age of death is more common.

The authors bring up the idea that foraging people were barely scraping by when in fact foraging can be extremely bountiful, especially if people are few and far between and nature is prestine. English explorers thought Australian aboriginals were starving when they first saw them because they were eating what they thought were the last thing anyone would eat - things like grubs and rats. When those are actually everywhere and the aboriginals were totally fine.

Disease is self-limiting if it cannot spread because individuals live far apart. So back in the day when humanity's population was tiny, it couldn't spread far. Think of the over-population of deer now that wolves aren't common: they get deer tuberculosis and other germs where I live because they're so densely populated :( .