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Was life better in hunter-gatherer times?

cold-takes.com · 4,712 words · saved by 1 readers

In order to answer this, one of the hardest things we need to do is get some sense of pre-agriculture quality of life. This appears to be a topic where there is a lot of room for controversy and confusion. My tentative position is that neither of these is quite right. I think the pre-agriculture world was noticeably worse than today's world (at least in developed countries), but probably some amount better than the world that immediately followed agriculture. This post will focus on the former: the comparison between the pre-agriculture world and today's world, or whether the "pre-agriculture Eden" hypothesis is right. I'll argue that today's best evidence suggests that today's developed world has significantly better quality of life than the pre-agriculture world. By doing so, I'll also lay the groundwork for a future post about what happened to quality of life in between the pre-agriculture world and today. This image illustrates how this post fits into the full "Has Life Gotten Bett

Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. For the last 200 years or so, life has been getting better for the average human in the world. What about for the 300,000+ years before that? In order to answer this, one of the hardest things we need to do is get some sense of pre-agriculture quality of life . Agriculture is estimated to have started drastically changing lifestyles, and leading to what we tend to think of as "civilization," around 10,000 BCE . Agriculture roughly means living off of domesticated plants and livestock , allowing a large population

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