Life and Death since the Paleolithic: Part 2

Demands of different lifestyles and adjustment stages.

This morning I found myself thinking about the future of our species, and of life on earth. It followed from what I was writing about yesterday, the way we used to be just one species among many others and have expanded to conquer vast territories beyond our original ecological niche. We’ve made big, disastrous changes to the planet, and we might not survive that long, certainly not in our current numbers, with our current way of life. We’re at a transition between stages of our progress, and it’s a crisis that could prove catastrophic.

I was thinking, too, about how some countries and communities are worried about declining birth rates. I don’t think it’s a problem, not in terms of species survival. If only a tiny percentage of us continue to reproduce, we will still go on. Homo sapiens were almost wiped out more than once in ancient pre-history (https://io9.gizmodo.com/close-calls-three-times-when-the-human-race-barely-esc-1730998797). If we have a massive global pandemic or water wars that decimate our population it’s going to absolutely suck for us as individuals, families, and communities, but it won't necessarily mean the end of our species (though it might).

As I considered the fluctuation of life expectancies in the past, it struck me that we don’t make transitions smoothly, either as individuals or as groups, even as a whole species. There was a drop in life expectancy, and probably in quality of life when we got into agriculture, but by the middle ages people were living just as long as they had as hunter gatherers. Moving into cities made early urbanites very vulnerable to disease, but we had moments of getting sanitation right, which improved things. The industrial revolution gave working poor people rickets and tuberculosis. TVs, computers, and junk food have left us with widespread cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Each new, life-changing technology offered our species something we wanted, whether it was a regular supply of carbohydrates or Netflix, even if it came at a high initial cost.

We haven’t learned to thrive in the wake of our latest set of innovations, but if we survive climate change etc., we probably will. I’m writing this to figure out a way through our current transition, to try to make it not a complete end of everything. I still want to know how to be happy and healthy when the world is shifting and we’re becoming even more alienated from our biological roots.

We learn things, and we change. In the old world on the savannas, we learned to use fire for cooking. Some say we started out as endurance/persistence hunters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting). The idea, as presented in Born to Run (or was it Eat & Run?) was that the whole tribe would go out and chase down an antelope or gazelle or whatever. The average adult was perfectly able to run all day, from their late teens into their 60s (if they lived that long). People’s speed peaks at around age 29, but declines only slowly after that. I don’t think that the average 29-year-old today could run a marathon, let alone whole family groups.
If, early in human history, our running ability was paramount, that probably changed as most people turned to agriculture. The Marathon that gave the sport its name was a noteworthy event in ancient Greece. With agriculture, we expanded our range of crops here and there and our health and lifespans improved, albeit usually not up to modern standards. With the industrial revolution, a few generations of workers were notably less healthy than their farming grandparents had been, but as the 20^th century got off the ground we figured out how to make cities less toxic.

Lifespans improved steadily in most of the world… until just lately. Now, most people have work that keeps them inside and sitting still for much of the day, and we get a lot of our entertainment sitting in front of screens, too. We’ve moved quickly away from cooking meals from scratch to buying takeout food or convenience foods at the grocery store.¹ Just like with the invention of early agriculture, we’re left with less nutritious diets than we had a little while ago, and a different physical environment. We know some of what we should do, whether it's exercise or diet, but it’s not always easy to maintain the motivation to go against the cultural grain even when we have the means to do so (which we don’t always).

I think I’m going to get into the actual “what to do” in the next post, but I’m really enjoying this all-over-the-place speculative digression.

1 This is actually not just a feature of early 21^st century life. In ancient Rome, most housing for non-rich people didn’t come with kitchens, and people basically got takeout. It’s an urban thing, I guess.