Originally Posted by
Dudelsack
Wow. We're all feeling quite Rousseauean here today, Noble Savage and all that sort of thing. Nature has always been red in tooth and claw, and I doubt life for our most ancient of ancestors was anything but nasty, brutish, and short.
Then again, when I hear Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez recordings I'm willing to reconsider this position.
Since this is the 50+ forum, I am probably allowed to confess that I am not aware of having ever heard either. I probably have heard them, but they'll have just been part of that general background slush that I just tune out.
As for nasty, brutal, and short, I'd be the last to romanticise the past. Modern dentistry and anaesthetics are unalloyed benefits of civilisation. But our palaeolithic, as opposed to neolithic, ancestors probably did pretty well, all in all. They were as big as we are, which seems to indicate that the hunter- gatherer diet allowed them to fulfil their genetic potential, and such hunter-gathere societies as we have come into contact with seem surprisingly OK, really. Until we give them our diseases and introduce them to economics, anyway...
Edit. And booze, of course. That always seems to help.