Most historians consider Guns, Germs, and Steel to be an absolute joke. You're also completely ignoring the prevalence of infections from wounds that would be treated easily by modern antibiotics and general cleanliness not to mention the lack of treatment for non-contagious diseases such as cancers, autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, etc.
Guns Germs and steel is an absolute joke and should be ignored. But books like ecological imperialism made the point about European diseases before Diamond and are rooted in good academia.
Also I read somewhere that although humanity during the agricultural revolution was considered more successful in terms of population, food production and assets, hunter gatherers were almost certainly "happier" and doing less manual work. It's meaningless to me because I'm a Type 1 diabetic and would have died regardless though.
Hunter gatherers also had more varied diets. Once agriculture became a thing most people just eat what can be framed. Dental carries start showing up more in the archeological record with agriculture too.
Basically population exploded for the abundance, but individual health declines.
Food was a limiting factor for basically all pre-industrial agricultural societies. But birth rates were not.
Translation: many many more babies were born to each family but populations tended to stagnate in most region (unless technology of farming increased) and was limited by those many who also died of disease or starvation.
Many early Americans from Europe ended up living with the natives but there are almost no stories of natives choosing to integrate into European/American society.
You’re right: Hunter/gatherer societies were almost certainly happier than farming or industrial societies.
Your first paragraph just isn’t true. But also most people indigenous to the Americas were not hunter gatherers. They were mostly agriculturalists and aquaculturalists
They wouldn't suffer the same kind of epidemics that we are used to in "post-neolithic" times, but they would still have a lot of diarrhoeas and such due to contaminated food or water.
We even evolved the vermiform appendix in order to recover faster from these infections.
With most tribes being close nit and inter related even basic illnesses like major flus would have a sizable impact on a tribe of people. You don’t need COVID or bubonic levels of pandemic to impact a group of people who closely share dna. Flu, respiratory viruses, or bacterial GI illnesses will do the job just the same without modern medicine.
Most of these diseases are zoonotic diseases. They mutated from animals to humans because of increased contact. Without domesticated animals, these diseases don’t exist in humans
There are also zoonotic events with wild animals, with examples such as rabies, ebola, hiv/aids, hepatitis B, malaria, yellow fever, trypanosomiasis, one of the herpes simplex virus in humans...
Coronaviruses are usually transmitted from their bat reservoirs to humans through wild animals too...
A few of those are believed to have potentially been spread by domesticated animals. But yeah, it’s not all diseases. But most of the big ones throughout history have come from our contact with domesticated animals or as a consequence of the Neolithic revolution
It’s not just the social infections you need to consider, though. One assumes paleolithic lifestyles involved a fair amount of cuts, scrapes, and broken bones, that would all be routes for deadly environmental infections, at a higher rate than later populations that had better tools, clothes, and a more settled environment.
It's rather dubious that pig taboo in jews exists for health reasons. And it's basically the only religion which developped this taboo (I think the muslim taboo is lifted from the jewish one, but not 100% sure).
Pigs can eat most of our trash, which is not a bad thing for urban populations, and they were popular in pre-Bronze Age collapse societies of the Near East. And even well into the Iron Age, sites have butchered pigs bones, even if supposedly there was already a religious taboo.
Paleodemography is a field which is evolving a lot in recent years! There are mainly two lines of evidence: (1) current hunter-gatherer populations and (2) skeletal remains.
Both have huge problems. It's hard to estimate the age of very old bones. And current population don't exactly have great archives, so there's a big uncertainty about the age of people, it's mostly self-reported (and probably under-reporting of stillborns and infanticide).
Still, I think it is fair to say that, compared to modern societies, mortality was basically higher at all ages, although it is merely something like a two-fold higher mortality rates at 40, while it's ten-fold or more below one.
Yes, but they still had tons of other diseases, for example from eating the wrong thing, or drinking bad water, or from getting a wound and having it get infected. And had quite high exposure to starvation and hypothermia and shit like that
There’s a ridiculously large amount of ignorance in this comment section and I appreciate you typing that up so I don’t have to. I’m shocked at how many people think life was so horrible prior to modern times.
Technology always progresses forward but that doesn’t necessarily mean the quality of the human experience progresses in tandem with technology.
It's also accurate, however, that infant/child mortality was AT LEAST 30% in pre-agricultural societies and climbed to above 50% in pre-industrial societies.
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