Yeah exactly skewing the numbers right it's a mathematical thing so if and and it's true that a lot of hunter-gatherer babies die uh in the first 10 years of life 15 to 25 in some cases so if you if you have 25 percent of uh kids die when they're five years old let's say and you mathematically average them in then the average lifespan at birth drops a lot right right but that's been misunderstood to mean that people were old when they were 30 20 000 years ago that's just not true right if you survived childhood and you made it into your teens and 20s you survived the communicable diseases and and you know some babies are born uh not equipped you know to to survive in that kind of environment uh which by the way is another reason that the kids in india that you saw look so happy,
And energized because the kids who aren't energized and aren't really healthy died that's what it's like in in many places of the world still today my ex-wife is from mozambique and she's a doctor and she talked about this a lot when she was working in europe she said you know i'm dealing with a lot of people with chronic diseases that just don't make it past childhood in africa so in africa when an adult comes into your your office as a doctor you're dealing with someone who's strong who's got a strong immune system who's got strong body they've they've been through the the filters you know whereas in europe in the united states we're very good at keeping people alive who wouldn't be otherwise we kind of evade natural selection,
Exactly that's so interesting exactly and you know i'm not saying what's better or what's worse i'm not making any ethical judgment i'm just noting that it changes things there's another piece to the um you know the domestication and kind of how our society is formed that's really interesting with the advent of agriculture moving out of hunter-gatherers now you have a surplus of food right and now you need property and there has to be property lines and someone that owns that property and then when you have these resources and you want to hoard them then you need armies and then you need systems of law and it it's just like when you when you zero in on what happened it seems like agriculture was possibly the worst thing that ever happened to the human race,
Yeah there's you see it that way yeah there's a famous essay by jared diamond who wrote guns germs and steel a huge book called the worst mistake in the history of the human race and it's about the advent of agriculture and and that's the argument he makes and others have made yeah i i think it's it's nuanced because there is archaeological evidence of agricultural societies that lasted for some centuries without becoming war-like expansionist groups but eventually they all did so it may be a little over simplistic and i'm guilty of this of saying agriculture causes this right right it's not like one step absolutely leads immediately to the next but everywhere that agriculture has arisen and it's arisen at least six times independently in different parts of the world,
Within a thousand years you have very hierarchical uh military expansionist um empires that grow around that uh agriculture so it does eventually there's a new book out um the dawn of everything i call i think it's called it just came out a week or two ago that makes a big point that okay there there is evidence that there are these societies that that were around for a while they seemed to be growing things but they weren't you know they didn't have slaves and they weren't attacking neighboring areas but eventually they do because the you know the the inescapable logic of agriculture is you start to grow food you end up with a surplus as you said birth rates go up because not only do you have that surface surplus of food but now you also have domesticated animals including cattle in most cases and so babies can be weaned earlier,
Because you've got cow milk rather than mother's milk which makes the women fertile sooner because as they're breastfeeding interesting while a woman is breastfeeding she tends not to ovulate especially if she has low body fat so hunter-gatherers who breastfed for four years typically uh were not fertile during those four years plus the nine months that they were pregnant so it kind of titrates the birth rate exactly right so that's why hunter-gatherer population levels remain static uh very steady very very minor growth uh globally uh for tens of thousands of years and then the as soon as agriculture appeared you see it just rocket uh global population there was another myth that you explore in that um hunter-gatherer people were constantly at war,
And you know got deemed as savages by the by the folks who came in on boats and whatnot um um where is that um story kind of getting yeah well that gets back to the the point i was making earlier i think you know talking about hobbs and the motivation for this uh this depiction of hunter-gatherers part of it is misunderstanding hobbs had never seen a hunter-gatherer right rousseau never met a hunter-gatherer these images that were developed by european philosophers were based upon accounts that were brought back from missionaries or travelers traders so it's very uh much not science right it's it's fantasy um in fact there's a very interesting thing i don't know if you remember in civilized to death there's an aside where i talk about the origin of the term noble savage,
Which is most people think it comes from rousseau never used the word it seems to have come from a french lawyer i believe who noted he wrote an essay and he said that these accounts of the of the native people in the americas that are coming back from the jesuits primarily they hunt wherever they want they are not subjected to anyone's whim they don't have kings telling them what to do and where they can go and where they can't go they act as if they're nobility right because in europe the only people could go where they wanted to do what they wanted were nobility so noble he meant they'd these savages live like kings right right the noble savage,
Anyway that but getting back to your earlier point the i think there's a great motivation to demonize hunter-gatherers because every society promotes itself every society advertises for the greatness of itself right that's one way to keep people obedient and and uh you know on the team is you tell them how great they have it and so if you're telling people that actually the hunter gatherers have it better than us the whole thing's going to collapse.
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