Was life really so hard for early humans?

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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In recent posts I have questioned whether life in the past really was worse than today, but so far I have only been thinking about historic times.

We are taught that life is getting better – this is progress. When one reads about pre-historic times, writers talk confidently of how hard life was for our distant ancestors. They had to hunt and forage for their own food, had none of the comforts of modern life, and no medicine and so were vulnerable to diseases and therefore had a relatively short life-expectancy.

It seems to me, however, that there are a number of important factors that do not get a mention.

These people were at home in their environment. They could make or find everything they needed, and that must have given them a lot of confidence.

Today people live in an environment that they do not understand, and are surrounded by technology that most of them know nothing about. If anything goes wrong they have to call in an ‘expert’ to get it mended. This is very stressful, and creates a lot of anxiety and feelings of insecurity.

People in prehistory were born into freedom. They owed nothing to anyone. They did not have to work to pay off a mortgage, or an education debt, did not live with the possibility of losing their home and being ‘on the street’ and starving; in fact, there was, presumably, no poverty. People had not taken possession of the land and animals and so one could go where one pleased and help oneself to whatever one found.

People must have been content with their lives, since there was not the huge gulf between rich and poor, with most people being tantalised by things that are out of their financial reach. People then were not slaves to money as they are forced to be today, and they did not have to devote themselves to the future, thinking of careers and finally of pensions; they could live in the present.

Life today is a very high maintenance affair. There is endless paper work, taxes, insurance, licences, mortgages, bills, bank accounts etc etc all demanding attention. Then there is all the technology which requires maintenance: cleaning, servicing and repairing or renewing. Of course, maintaining a house is very demanding and time consuming. In contrast, life in prehistoric time was extremely low maintenance, so people would have had more time to do things they really wanted to do, more time to just have fun.

I think there would also have been much less boredom. People then would have known how to amuse themselves, since there was no option to buy their amusements instead. There is a lot of boredom around today, and much of it stems from the fact that people have gotten used to buying their amusements and do not know how to entertain themselves.

I am not saying that, given the option, I would chose to be transported back in time to live in the stone-age. I would suffer severe culture shock, I am sure. But nevertheless, it seems to me very likely that people born to that life were more confident, secure, free and contented, even happy, than people born into our world are.

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I think life was in comparison with today's standards much , much harder.  They had only rudimentary tools such as spears made out of tree branches, or rocks, to defend themselves against wild animals, and depending on how you go back in history, they did not yet discovered fire, but you have to go way back for that.  They mostly lived in caves, they had no script, they drew pictures to represent things which were of present danger- usually wild ani$als.  Their clothes consisted. Of tree leaves or animal skins, and they fought to the death for their mate, whom they dragged into a cave by grasping their hair. Development along these lines, even in minute increments took hundreds of years, and that's not even to m$ention the state of medicine, the earliest of which happened, I think in egypt, with very limited success.
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Today is the most hedonistic, pleasure-seeking, decadent time in perhaps all of human history, except perhaps at the heights of the Roman Empire.

Think about the Romans transporting water from miles away through Aqueducts, just so their Emperor would have a hot bath. Is this not decadent?

Now, almost every home has: heating, air conditioning, ovens, refrigerators, microwaves, soft beds, baths, showers, etc.

You really cannot compare the time when pre-humans huddled together in huts, with no fire, light, or warmth, fearing for their lives against savage monsters and other competing pre-human tribes every night of their lives, for countless millenniums.

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True: so you were not going back all the way back to those very early times. If you are considering the Roman times, are you saying it was better back then ? Or, there is as much decadence now, as in the Roman times. It looks like these are two different questions. Or are you saying that the decadence in Roman times was comparably better then it is now?
I tend to agree with you about th decadence as a measure of comparison, in both of those times, minus all the appliances we have now.

My happiest moments as far as I can remember, was living in a small farm community with no cars, TV, electricity, and a horse and a buggy is all we had to go to the church on sundays, and to the movie house, where 1 movie in black and white was shown on tuesday night. It was an intensely happy time and I would think, that there are very few places left in the world like that, in the western world.

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I’m saying that pre “civilized” human history was hell. So, yes, it was really so hard for pre-humans.

Everything after Christ and the Roman Empire has been exponential upgrades to human hedonism and decadence.

The internet is a massive orgy of human hedonism.

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I don’t know that it would have been all that bad for pre-humans. There have always been I Love Lucy reruns to take off the edge.

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Dragon, I agree that life was on average better for early nomadic tribes of people. I realize that they lived much shorter lives on average and that the danger of death was always there, but they never expected life to be safe, like so many Westerners do. I suffered from this idea worse than anyone, and I’m slowly getting away from it.

So now if I were just a little more athletic, and such, my intitial reaction would be to jump at the chance if “time travel” were possible. The huge benifit for me personaly wouldn’t be leaving behind all the pressures of modern life, because those pressures are often based on misconsceptions about what is real, or what must be taken as real for those not suited to such persceptions of reality I’ve already well on my way to being over them, when you see my threads complaining about them, that’s how I get them out of my system.

The benifit for me would simply be living as I assume we evolved to live, I know that’s a huge oversimplification of evolutionary theory, I’m just saying I appreciate the common sentiment of “getting back to nature”. The problem that would lead me to think twice about it would be if I were the only one to have knowledge of modern ideas in philosophy and related subjects.

Obviously, the people back then would have that problem, and they would be living as naturally as possible, whatever that means. And also, the issue of the hard living seems easily negated when one sees how few people who have the chance to retire early does so. Everyone works hard for some abstract “purpose” or if for no other reason than they can’t sit still. I think it would be nice to work hard for a more concrete sounding purpose such as immediate survival.

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OP makes some good points. It’s funny to see the responses mentioning caves (though the arthritis would suck!), huts, and lack of A/C. Lifespan is another funny thing to mention.

I’ve always hated artists’ renderings, diaramas, etc. of early humans. The woodchucks and squirrels in my yard present with more dignity.

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Are you refering to me mentioning lifespan, and how is it funny? I’m not suggesting we take it as seriously as possible, but It’s a relevant in the context…

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Sorry Stuart, didn’t mean to offend. I’m not laughing at you. I think the lifespan thing is ‘funny’ because it doesn’t matter. Does it make you unhappy that you won’t live to be 300? Isn’t quality of life more important?

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At the point of death, the “quality of life” goes to absolute zero.

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I think I implied that the length of one’s life matters relative to one’s expectations of it in my first paragraph above, I wasn’t offended just confused. And I agree, I have no wish to live to 300, and quality is more important.

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But, it doesn’t go negative after death and therefore is not even part of the equation.

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The quality of a life can be measured by the integral of the joy over a lifetime.

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I assume you mean that ideally it can be measured in such a way.

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If “ideally” meant “mathematically”, then yeah.
What people call their quality of life, in analytical terms, is merely an integral sum over a length of time.
If Science could figure out how to measure it properly, they would be far more accurate as assessing it.
…or unless their results didn’t show what they wanted them to show, anyway.

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James, you inspired me to make a thread on the issues related to happyness, in the philosophy forum. I’ve been meaning to do so for a while.

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Don’t feel so glum. In two hundred years or so civilization will revert back to 18th or 17th century living standards due to energy depletion.

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Ancient humans would not know they had a rough life, it would be just life. If you don’t know a car exists you can’t want one. You could imagine one but, knowing it does not exist puts it in the realm of pretend/dream.

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I know what you are saying here, but rough life would alternate with easy life and they would be aware of a preferred form of life. Logically, they would prefer an abundant food supply to limited food of winter. A healthy leg to a limp brought on by a broken leg which does not set properly. A live child to one which has died of disease.

IOW, they had plenty of reasons to be unhappy and to want another kind of life.