I didn’t miss your point, I just didn’t entirely agree with it.
I guess we could always give up everything we have now and return to the wild along with a substantially reduced life expectancy (somewhere between 20 and 40), stop medical treatment and go back to no or primitive surgery. Some might have been happier and more settled than todays people - they just didn’t get to stick around that long and no time to get depressed - if you didn’t get out there you didn’t eat. Sick and “old” you were also a liability
Mongols retained their hunter gatherer lifestyle despite managing to knock off large towns and create murder and mayhem among any who didn’t get on with them.
the Andaman Islands tribe that has a habit of killing intruders doesn’t seem that friendly or welcoming of strangers either / maybe just a little territorial.
I think that there is a view that somehow these societies were cooperative and more equal but that’s not necessity so. Not all hunter gatherers were nomads or on the move and where they were not or were more settled, evidence is that social stratification started to show. nor were they that welcoming of others - they operated in small groups for sure but that’s because the bigger the group the more complexity. read some of the theories that resistance to domination is a prime driver of human behaviour and that might explain a lot as well and my question remains - if it was sweetness and light as a hunter gatherer what on earth made them move into settlements and start cropping.
does that mean i am defending modern life - no it doesn’t. We continually replace one set of life problems with another. And each time we find a way to make it hard all over again. Because we are dealing with the complexity of life itself.
which takes me back to my comment that we can choose how we are and how we handle life and whether we are decent or accumulate stuff or look for others to help us out, pay our way, provide shelter and food , try to be bigger, smarter, more well off than others, or belittle others life choices or any other behaviours that might create conflict.
