Re: the mythology of work

On Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:55:47 -0300, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

We’re told that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short” back then—but that narrative comes to us from the ones who
stamped out that way of life, not the ones who practiced it.

We also have the evidence of their dead bodies. Look at the graves of
hunter-gatherers, compared to, say, those of the early agricultural
societies. The hunter-gatherers look like a much fitter bunch, while the
agriculturalists often show evidence of suffering from a variety of
chronic medical conditions. But remember, they all died anyway. So it
didn’t take as much to kill the hunter-gatherers as it did to knock off
someone from a society practising organized agriculture.