This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils, was such that he gave up his whole birthright in exchange for the food.

The era in which humans chose whether to continue with a hunter gatherer life or join the new farming communities also seems to have influenced the stories of Adam and Eve ("cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread") and Cain and Abel.

Some have also suggested that archaic prohibitions against eating the food of fairies were a taboo designed to warn off young people from leaving farming or herding groups and joining hunter gatherer communities. They would be enchanted by the easy going lifestyle but then end up hungry and sick.

The need to spend hours every day working a field, in a season when food was plentiful, in order to prepare for another season 6 or 9 months away, must have been a huge cultural crossroads, possibly a bigger break from our close animal ancestors than tool making, and its influence is still with us. Rules around not eating animals who are needed to supply milk and to reproduce the herd similarly cast a long shadow.

No, it was easier. Not just lower risk. It gave you advantages both in terms of self defence, resources and even aggression toward surrounding group if you were collectively assholes.

It was easier to make your numbers go up, raise more kids which made you stronger.

The population increased because half of it wasn't dying off immediately. You have to include the half that dies off early in the calculations of QoL for hunter/gatherers.

“Trapped” in a life that meant women didn’t have to regularly murder their children.

Such nonsense the idea that farming was a trap. I think it was Sapiens that propagated this myth in recent times.

Oh, really? Then why did they choose farming? And no, it wasn’t a trap, they experimented with farming and could have gone back to hunting if as you imply it truly was better.

They had a place that was familiar and comforting to go return to.

Anyone who is of a modern industrialized society who is waxing poetically about becoming a hunter gatherer is both, looking at history thru very rose colored goggles and welcome to go find a place to do just that.

But you've selected one particular group. The thousands of groups and individuals who merged their way of life with that of farming/toolmaking/industrialised/modern human society do not have a name, they are just part of the human mainstream.

Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or coercion. But many didn't. So many groups have wanted to participate in technological progress, even at the cost of giving up their previous way of life, that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted.

> Antibiotics and Insulin - those two things have saves untold lives.

Type 1 is about 0.5% prevalence. Type 1 diabetes was a rapid death sentence before insulin discovery in the 1920s.

Type 2 is more common (maybe 10% but highly dependent on country) and it is a relatively modern problem

Infant mortality has dropped to 0.5% from 7% 100 years ago - so that's more significant.

That's from Arnold Henry Savage Landor and I suspect it was fabricated or exaggerated, like many Victorian era British tales of savages abroad.

Antibiotics should IMO be reserved for life threatening situations, or likely upcoming life threatening situations. In the 80s as a toddler I was given antibiotics for measles (they can’t possibly work on viruses), and had half a year of diarrhea afterwards.

>Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world.

There’s plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt, water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it’s not very hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit in the wild.

>factory farms

Didn’t need factory farms for smallpox. Many animals live in large herds, which were larger in the past. If you read accounts from the 18th and early 19th century there are many reports of squirrel migrations involving hundreds of millions of squirrels in relatively small areas.

>Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world

Traded neolithic goods regularly crossed continents. If an axe head can cross the continent then so can a microscopic disease.

insects, predator animals, cuts+bacteria all seem like quite hard-to-avoid disease vectors. we can spread disease quickly these days, but there are no shortage of ancient diseases you could've come across in a small hunter-gatherer society

I believe the modern world creates a lot of mental health problems, loneliness, and unhappines, but it's absolutely physically safer and more survivable (and more comfortable) for a huge percentage of the developed world. (It creates those mental problems unnecessarily, given the level of technology we have, but deeply baked into our fairly-antisocial individualistic culture)

Parent specifically called out antibiotics, which are for bacterial infections, not diseases. Coupled with the increased number of things to step on or get cut by means you really need them.