Was primitive lifestyle better or worse, and should we go back to it?

Well, it is hard to say what childhood diseases might have been around then. Many of today's diseases have the domestication of livestock to thank for their foothold on human biology. It seems to me the spread in ages between your two children would be just about right, developmentally speaking, so as not to put too much strain on the community.

 

Not really. We have vaccines for them now. (There's a reason they called polio Infantile Paralysis.)

 

So we know for sure that polio existed in the human population before the advent of agriculture? Technically I suppose, to say what childhood diseases might have been around then, is as easy as saying any other phrase.

 

I'm not talking about before agriculture, I'm talking about before the germ theory of disease...say, about 150 years ago.

 

I see that polio specifically is endemic only to humans and modern treatment of the disease is a boon to the 1% of the cases of infection that develop into paralytic symptoms.

 

Is your point that modern medicine has not not lowered, or perhaps raised, infant & childhood mortality rates? And let's remember the other member of my family...back in The Good Old Days, childbirth was somewhat safer than a friendly game of Russian Roulette...with an automatic.

 

Well If mankind ever decided to abandon his cities of steel and glass to once again go native, all of the problems which reduced his average life expectancy by more than 20 years would resurface once again.


Hotwater

 

No, I am suggesting that before the advent of agriculture, and specifically animal domestication, that humans had fewer diseases than we do now. I am suggesting that before the advent of dense sedentary human population, we had fewer diseases.

 

Clifford Simak wrote a short story entitled Courtesy in which an advanced race of humanoids on a distant planet vacate their modern cities and return to a more primitive way of life after the plague strikes.

It turns out the plague was caused by decadence

By returning to a simpler sedentary life in which mutual respect and cooperation was essential to survive they were no longer affected by the disease. Then of course along comes a spaceship full of humans from earth who descend upon their planet and the plague reemerges once again to cut down the new comers one by one with one exception; the one human who showed the natives ‘simple basic common courtesy’


Hotwater

 

Something that for some curious reason doesn't seem to apply to members of ones own household.

 

Sorry to hear that

They should be grateful they don’t live on the planet landro



H

 

Doesn't apply to my current situation, but some of the rudest behavior I have ever seen came from ex wife, siblings, and other wise supposedly friendly acquaintances. No stranger had dared to treat me like that.

 

Likewise,Dope.