« Iran Proxies | Main | Punishment for the Innocent » Malawi vs. the Stone Age28 Oct 2007 03:36 pm
I'm happy to believe that the standard of living in Malawi is deplorable (have I plugged the ONE Campaign recently?) but Gregory Clark's argument that living standards are actually worse than they were for stone age hunter-gatherers seems a bit hard to believe. This comes to me via Brad DeLong who seems to agree. Either way, I keep meaning to read Clark's book and it certainly does seem interesting. Comments (45)
You need to read some anthropology published in the last twenty-five years. It's pretty much a commonplace that adult Stone Age hunter-gatherers were, on average, a lot healthier than the people in the agricultural societies and water empires that succeeded them. 
Ditto jeb. Adopting agriculture brings along many new health hazards. I'm not sure why it's so hard to believe that foraging societies (the basic human organization for much of the life of the species) might have an edge over a society ravaged by kleptocratic governance and infectious diseases.
It probably depends on the location one is talking about. Places like Neolithic Japan or pre-Columbian california, where there was plenty of natural food and gamer, and a moderate climate, would have been quite pleasant to live in. But Siberia or the Australian deserts quite a bit less so.
For one thing, I suppose higher population density = more problems with sanitation and waste disposal. Also, the ability to relocate relatively easily lets you move beyond waste-polluted and resource-stripped areas, which can then recuperate.
Places like Neolithic Japan or pre-Columbian california both of these were mostly gathering cultures from what i recall, though they were aware of and did engage in some agriculture (in california the supply of nuts was so large that agriculture wasn't efficient).
In 1800s England, why is life expectancy at 20 less than life expectancy at birth? That makes no sense.
Re: Neil - maybe there was some specific mortality-causing event that was more likely to affect people who were 20 in 1800 than people who were born then. That's the only explanation I can think of.
If the life expectancy numbers were constructed retrospectively, then the name of that event is almost certainly "the Napoleonic Wars." A newborn in 1800 would miss them entirely. A 20-year old male in 1800 would be of service age throughout 15 years of warfare.
I would theorize that as the food supply of hunters-gatherers was more unpredictable, the population levels were stable at a level that was quite a bit lower than sustainable at MOST TIMES. This means that most of the time they had plenty of food. By the way of contrast, agriculturalist may live much closer to the average capacity of their environment. The second aspect is that evolutionary speaking, we moved away from the diet of hunter-gatherers rather recently, so we are better adapted to it. Big variety of plants, a lot of dietary fiber, lean meat, fish from time to time, a dietician dream. Trying to recreate it today would take a fortune (or a lot of time, perhaps we could gather in state forests). So your average hunter-gatherer had fewer contacts with diseases, and more food, and better food. If anything, in "hard to survive" places like Siberia and Australian desert they would be particularly health and well fed. Nut-eaters of California could prosper if nut crop varies a lot from year to year.
Probably the big problem Malawi has compared to stone agers is HIV/AIDS. About 15% of the population has it, so Malawi is in the midst of a slow epidemic that is, relatively speaking, half the size of the Black Death. That has to put a big drag on the life expectancy, one of the big indicators used to compare contemporary Malawians and paleolithic people. Perhaps healthy Malawians are better off than healthy paleolithic people, but HIV-infected Malawians are a lot worse off than healthy paleolithic people, and HIV-infected paleolithic people... didn't exist, as far as we know. Perhaps plagues hit paleolithic groups from time to time, but if so, paleolithic groups that are currently in the midst of a plague are not what we're using for comparison to contemporary Malawians.
Too bad Strom Thurmond passed away, otherwise maybe would could have just asked him to compare and contrast his Stone Age vs. DixieCrat vs. Modern Age experiences.
Hmm, that makes sense now.
And furthermore, hunter-gatherers could have a lot of leisure-time compared with later societies, especially compared to the backbreaking labor of subsistence farming.
"in california the supply of nuts was so large . . ." The more things change. . .
I read at a museum in DC that Stone-Age people were taller than today's Americans, but that the shrank 20cm when they turned agricultural. Never understood why though. Is raw meat that much better for you than bread?
Height is based on vitamins, minerals, protein, essential amino acids. Agriculture is based on grain crops like rice, wheat, and corn. Calories will keep you alive, but don't allow you to grow to your best potential height. So, the average peasant in 1820 will have enough bread to stay alive, but he could have rickets, goiter, or just plain old short height, because of lack of meat and veggies. This is why 2005 Americans are shorter than 2005 Belgians. Belgians eat a balanced diet of meat, and vegetables, and have good health care. Americans, on average, eat too much junk food, and have poor health care.
The only way to have a higher-than-subsistence standard of living for most people back then was some factor that kept population well under carrying capacity - which meant, basically, epidemic disease or warfare. A disease whose impact worsened rapidly with increasing population density could have kept population low, leaving people well-fed. Or, more likely, prehistoric warfare kept populations low.
Now, if this were France in 1800, I could believe that the Napoleonic Wars would have a significant enough effect to make life expectancy at 20 less than life expectancy at birth. That being said, England, while it certainly had a lot of people involved in the wars, was hardly all that mobilized - it was, after all, famous for paying other people to fight for them, on land at least. Even in the Peninsular Wars, there were far more Portuguese and Spanish troops fighting under Wellington than English, and at Waterloo Wellington commanded an army that was largely Hanoverian and Dutch. So I'm dubious. Is it possible that the two numbers were reversed?
A stable population level in a human (or animal) society means one of two things: high infant mortality or control of fertility (in humans, by birth control or by social practices such as celibacy and late marriage). Presumably the reason Stone Age societies had lower population density than the succeeding agricultural societies is that they had much higher infant mortality rates due to food shortages. Unless they were able to control fertility, which seems doubtful, there's no other explanation. Now, if you're willing to accept that 5 out 6 babies wil die, it's possible to posit that those who survive will have a good life.
I lived in Malawi for 2 years: wonderful country. A Malawian co-worker asked me if all Amercian kids got growth hormones and I had no idea what he meant. He then said that a friend of his went to live in America and the kids were huge; not obese, just tall and, well, healthy. He assumed it was growth hormones that his friend had given his kids.
If we're talking stone-age California, it's probably not true that the hunter-gatherers had all that much leisure time, since the nuts discussed above are acorns, which require a tremendous amoung of work to prepare. But then the abundant shellfish, stream fish, and birds probably made up a large part of most early California diets. (There's a tendency to overgeneralize based on the native American population that was left alive to be studied by the early anthropologists as opposed to the SF Bay or Coastal tribes).
Maybe the problem was political dogmatism by donor countries: Something is missing in Malawi these days: anxiety. The sense of tension and strain that underlay nearly every conversation and interaction in the past few years, hungry years, is absent. There is a lightness in most parts of the country, an expansiveness, a certain sense of peace. A record harvest, a massive surplus of the staple crop, would be good news anywhere in the developing world. But it's particularly gratifying in Malawi, a country that has been plagued with critical food shortages several times in the past decade. In 2002, an estimated 1,500 people starved to death in the worst food shortage since independence. In 2005, the United Nations World Food Program scrambled to supply emergency rations to more than five million people, nearly half the country.
Re: This is why 2005 Americans are shorter than 2005 Belgians. No, that is because Americans are a mix of many peoples, some of whose height potential is less than that of NW Europeans, which has been famous for its "tall genes" since antiquity. Until quite recently there was very little immigration into NW Europe and so there has been little genetic mixing, thus allowing height-enhancing genes to reinforce themselves-- and now find full expression since modern farming allows adequete nutrition for nearly 100% of the population. But in US genetic mixing has brought about regression toward the human mean. There is after all very little outright malnurition in the US of the sort that causes growth stunting, and the American diet differs very little fron the NW European on which it is based. (The principle difference is the greater use of corn and corn products here, something that has been true in North America since the Mexican natives first domesticated maize). As for healthcare American healthcare is as good as that of Europe, at least for everyone working class and above. The problem with American healthcare is not its quality but its financing. That is, you may go bankrupt from being ill in America, but the care you receive will be as good as it gets. Re: Except for the ruling classes, who never starved. Given ignornace about nutrition even the ruling class often suffered from vitamin and mineral deficiencies. And from the side-effects of poor sanitation and disastrously misguided medical mis-treatments. Re: Or, more likely, prehistoric warfare kept populations low. Disease, especially childhood disease, kept population in line. Wars were too limited and no where near lethal enough to do the job. Unless you were right in the path of an invading army (which generally numbered only in the ten thousands) you were not at risk at all when a war broke out. That danger required the air power and missiles and high-power explosives of the modern world.
JonF, You are misinformed, if patriotic. But just as it has in so many other arenas, America's predominance in height has faded. Americans reached a height plateau after World War II, gradually falling behind the rest of the world as it continued growing taller. By the time the baby boomers reached adulthood in the 1960s, most northern and western European countries had caught up with and surpassed the United States. Young adults in Japan and other prosperous Asian countries now stand nearly as tall as Americans do. Even residents of the formerly communist East Germany are taller than Americans today. In Holland, the tallest country in the world, the typical man now measures 6 feet, a good two inches more than his average American counterpart. Like many human traits, an individual's height is determined by a mix of genes and environment. Some experts put the contribution of genes at 40 percent, some at 70 percent, some even higher. But they all agree that aside from African pygmies and a few similar exceptions, most populations have about the same genetic potential for height. "American children might consume more meals prepared outside of the home, more fast food rich in fat, high in energy density and low in essential micronutrients," wrote Komlos and co-author Benjamin E. Lauderdale of Princeton University. "Furthermore, the European welfare states provide a more comprehensive social safety net including universal health care coverage." In another recent paper, Komlos and Lauderdale also found height inequality between American urbanites and residents of suburbs and rural areas. In Kansas, for example, white males are about as tall as their European peers; it's big cities like New York, where men are about 1.75 inches shorter than that, that drag America's average down. Now Komlos has started comparing the heights of children to determine at what age Americans begin falling behind their peers across the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, he sees a difference from birth, an observation that suggests prenatal care may be significant contributor factor to the height gap. But it is unlikely that Komlos will ever find one simple factor to explain why Americans have fallen behind other rich countries in height. In all likelihood it is caused by a combination of things -- a little bit health care, some diet, a sprinkling of economic inequality.
Some experts put the contribution of genes at 40 percent, some at 70 percent, some even higher. But they all agree that aside from African pygmies and a few similar exceptions, most populations have about the same genetic potential for height. It seems highly counterintuitive that natural selection would exert an effect on such things as skin and eye color but not on height or body shape. Even if said unnamed "experts" are correct, it might be the case that it is immigration that is mainly to blame for why Americans have fallen behind Northern Europeans. If you add, say, 35 million immigrants to the US population since the late 1960s -- nearly all of whom hail from places poorer than the US -- it stands to reason that these millions of poorer, newly minted Americans will bring down the US average. I mean, if poverty and poverty-related poor nutrition are such major factors affecting height, how could America's much greater intake of poor third world newcomers not affect the average height of Americans? I know Europe gets its share of immigrants, but its foreign born population is significantly lower than America's. In short, America has rather quickly seen its "national genotype" come to resemble much more closely that of the poorer, developing world. What would be interesting is to see height studies comparing the height of Caucasian Americans of Northern European ancestry to Northern Europeans. My guess is you'd likely still see some height advantage for the Europeans: America's slightly weaker healthcare delivery system, greater poverty and heavier dietary reliance on carbohydrates (especially corn) in theory should negatively impact height. But, in doing such a comparison -- which essentially strips out ethnographic genetic differences as a factor -- I'd confidently predict the height advantage of the Europeans would be vanishingly small. FWIW, this is not meant as an immigrant-bash. As long as America is capable of making meaningful additions to the basketball talent pool, I fail to see why worrying about average national height is something that should occupy anybody's time. Even if global height standing were a substantive issue, I reckon a modest, temporary retreat from the commanding heights of global tallness is a price worth paying for the vigor and economic vitality conferred by immigration.
Here's a chart. Americans were taller than northern Europeans before WWII. And now they are shorter. It seems a little chauvinistic to attribute that to immigration. If that were the case, then Americans and Europeans would have the same height in 1850.
Wrong: the _percentage_ of the population killed in primitive warfare, before states, looks to have been considerably higher than in modern war. Take a look at _War Before Civilization_.
The reason for America's lower height is my personal exceptional shortness. I am -9,500 miles tall. This takes approximately 2 inches off of the national mean. Glad to have solved that.
An excerpt from Part I of my review of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: Clark offers a stunning rebuke to economists: "God clearly created the laws of the economic world in order to have a little fun at economists' expense. In other areas of inquiry, such as the physical sciences, there has been a steady accumulation of knowledge over the past four hundred years. … In economics, however, we see instead that our ability to describe and predict the economic world reached a peak around 1800. In the years since the Industrial Revolution there has been a progressive and continuing disengagement of economic models from any ability to predict differences of income and wealth across time and across countries and regions." In other words, economists were closer to understanding the wealth of nations in 1776 when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations than they are today. The pioneering economic works of Smith and Thomas Malthus (1798) accurately described the world before the Industrial Revolution that was just getting underway then with the employment of the steam engine in cotton mills. By 1817, when David Ricardo was pessimistically propounding what later came to be known as "the Iron Law of Wages," England was moving in a new, liberating direction unexpected by economists. In the modern world, a shortage of cheap labor turned out to be a blessing rather than a curse. The future belonged to countries with high wage, high quality work forces. But the prestige of the economists and their Scroogeonomic emphasis on cheap labor was so great that Britain didn't even effectively outlaw the use of five-year-old boys as chimney sweeps until 1875. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/071008_farewell.htm
An excerpt from Part 2 of my review of Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: In A Farewell to Alms, economic historian Gregory Clark asks: Why has the Industrial Revolution of the last two centuries caused a Great Divergence, making some nations so rich, while others have stayed so poor? This is a social scientist's question, not a historian's, because there are enough separate countries in the world that general patterns can be perceived that can be reasonably well explained by a limited number of factors. There are a lot of data to work with, folks. A quick survey of the globe shows, for example, that countries tend to be poorer when they are ruled by crazed ideologies (e.g., North Korea vs. South Korea) or are far inland (e.g., Paraguay vs. Uruguay). But another factor is so obvious that we aren't supposed to mention it: http://www.vdare.com/sailer/071014_farewell_part2.htm
If you are interested in height, here's a bit from my 2003 article "NBA Height Spreading Globally:" The Iberian economies, which once lagged far behind the rest of Western Europe, closed much of the gap in recent decades. Infant mortality rates, which correlate negatively with height, had dropped to typical Northern European levels by the mid-1980s, so Steckel expects the height gap to narrow as well. Similarly, West Africans are significantly shorter on average than their distant cousins, the much richer African-Americans. (American blacks account for 19 of the 25 All-Stars, vs. zero African players in either the main showcase game or the young players' game.) Few Africans have yet done much in the NBA, and most of those who have are big men from Africa's well-nourished middle class. The great Hakeem Olajuwon is the son of the prosperous owner of a cement company. Defensive star Dikembe Mutombo's father was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. Los Angeles Clippers center Michael Olowokandi is the son of a Nigerian diplomat and was raised in Britain. Still, some parts of the globe seem to produce lots of tall people, no matter how bad the conditions. After all, height is influenced not only by environment, but by genetics, as well. One of the two tallest players in NBA history was 7'-7" Manute Bol. An illiterate herdsman who once tracked a lion preying on his cattle and killed it with his spear, Bol twice led the NBA in blocked shots. Bol is a member of the Dinka tribe of southern Sudan. A higher proportion of extremely tall people are believed to be found among the Dinkas and their neighbors along the Upper Nile than anywhere else on Earth. Bol, for example, says his younger sister is 6'-10." Remarkably, the Dinka grow so tall despite numbering among the world's most tragically oppressed peoples. The black southerners, who are Christians and pagans, rebelled against the Muslims from northern Sudan who traditionally captured them for use as slaves. Roughly 2 million people have died in two decades of civil war. Within Europe, especially tall people can be found in the gritty ex-communist countries in the Baltic and the Balkan areas. In the All-Star Game, Cleveland's 7'-3" Zydrunas Ilgauskas will carry on Lithuania's proud basketball tradition. The heart of the 1988 Soviet Olympic team that beat America for the gold medal was made up not of Russians but of Lithuanians such as 7'-3" Arvydas Sabonis, now with Portland. Lithuania has medalled in all three Olympic basketball tournaments since the tiny country regained its independence from the Soviet empire. The other traditional center of European basketball dominance is the mountainous and war-torn Balkans in the southeast. The region will be represented in the All-Star Game by Peja Stojakovic, the 6'-10" Sacramento forward from Serbia. Under its old name of Yugoslavia, Serbia medalled in the 1996 Olympics. Serbia's neighbor and rival Croatia medalled in 1992. Europeans tend to grow tallest where the climate is cold but not frigid. Writing in 1965 before the Dutch grew quite so tall, the prominent physical anthropologist Carlton Coon noted, "In mean stature, we find the tallest people in Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the eastern Baltic region, and the Balkans, particularly Montenegro and Albania. In general, the crest of tallest stature runs on the cold side of the winter frost line." http://www.isteve.com/2003_NBA_Height_Spreading_Globally.htm
A stable population level in a human (or animal) society means one of two things: high infant mortality or control of fertility (in humans, by birth control or by social practices such as celibacy and late marriage). Presumably the reason Stone Age societies had lower population density than the succeeding agricultural societies is that they had much higher infant mortality rates due to food shortages.. Not true, as hunter-gatherer or nomadic tribes lived away from the fouled water, boom and bust population cycles based on drought ot crp disease, lived away from disease dens that killed so many agricultural and city-dwelling people. Hunter gatherers, nomads had steadier populations because they had the food they preferred to eat, but then if necessary would go to the stuff they avoided normally like bitter roots, worms, eating low-nutrition plants. What kept their populations stable and healthier was constant tribal warfare. This probably greatly aided man's self-selection of vigorous genetic traits. Because they didn't. That left you with the choice of killing adjacent tribal warriors, undesired people from other tribes, or shrinking and dying out as your territory was taken by another tribe under population pressure. Like in the animal world, territoriality and control of breeding females causes population stability. A fact anthropologists noted that nomads and hunter-gatherers occupied stable niches in Africa, in the stone age tribes of New Guinea and SE Asia mountains. Unlike the Chinese that grew from 77-80 million in 1400 to 1.2 billion today, excavation shows the Aussie Abos, New Guineans, Arab nomads had hundreds of years of stable populations regulated by warfare. Much to the dismay of pacifists, in the 50 millenia from the emergence of homo sapiens until agriculture came - all the signs point to war and killing the weaker was a normal, valuable way of stabilizing human population to available resources.
According to Clark's book, among the medieval English, only the aristocracy were in much danger of dying in war (26% of English male aristocrats died violently in the 13-1400s). Of course, it was vastly helpful to be on an island. Murder rates were high by modern suburban standards, but the English got domestic violence reasonably well under control in the 1500s. The English of 1200-1800 kept their population under control largely by practicing what the Rev. Malthus would later preach: moral restraint: late marriage (the average woman married at 24-26), less than universal marriage, and low illegitimacy rates (around 4%). Wealthy commoners had twice as many surviving children as poor commoners, so the modern English are mostly descended from the successful strivers of the past.
The insane racist Steve Sailer and the insane racist Chris Ford, competing to find who is the most insane racist of them all.
This is apples and oranges. At the risk of sounding facetious, one cannot just compare statistics from 'the stone age' with those of a specific date (1800) and place (England) and expect them to have any validity whatsoever. 'The stone age' is a useless term which means almost nothing. It literally denotes the entire period from 1.6 million years ago (or even older) through 2000 BC (but that's just in Europe - the transition from 'stone' to 'metal' ages happened at different times in different places all around the world). Moreover, there was no one way of subsisting in the world in 'the stone age' nor one life style. A credible study could be made by comparing populations living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in a location with similar environmental factors to 19th century england. On the other hand, life expectancy, quality of life, diet, social structure, etc. are all highly debated in archaeological circles when you're talking about pre-modern (non-historical, prehistoric, STONE AGE) societies. I understand that Matt's not a specialist, but whoever has made this comparison ought to take a few archaeology classes before he makes a fool of himself.
Bloix-- the thing about hunter-gatherer economies is that they respond incrementally. You remark: A stable population level in a human (or animal) society means one of two things: high infant mortality or control of fertility (in humans, by birth control or by social practices such as celibacy and late marriage) In the first place, this is an interesting example of human exceptionalism. Species reach stable population balances wrt resource availability all the time, with no birth control or big fluctuations in infant mortality. A hunter-gatherer human society would be like a chimp population, stable inside its territory--with the attendant murder/clan warfare issues referred to above. Fertility control happens naturally. There are any number of natural, incremental elements that regulate fertility, ranging from the contraceptive effects of lactation to fertility suppression at times of nutrional stress. It's hard to figure out prehistoric infant mortality in hunter gatherer populations. In modern times, under centralized agriculture, population density and poor sanitation leads to high rates of infant mortality. Hunter gatherer societies hit carrying capacity at low population densities, so these saniation issues are less relevant. It's unlikely an infant would starve to death, even in a time of food resource scarcity; the mother would have to stop lactating for that to happen. Famines are political phenomena that accompany centralized agriculture, not elements that would be present in a hunter-gatherer regime. But there is little doubt that centralized agricutural regimes were much worse for the bottom couple of quintiles than were hunter gatherer regimes--in terms of physical measures performed on skeletons. You were much better off if you were a Nuer in the southern Sudan than working as slave labor for the Egyptians. And being a European peasant in the 17th century really sucked, again, by physical measures of skeletons. Jennifer-- Insane racist Steve Sailer is certainly right about the Dinka. (Thanks, by the way. I couldn't remember why I recognized the name). I spent a year living in a 15 household Dinka cluster of subsistence farmers. Even though my neighbors were about as impoverished as you can get, living almost entirely on sorghum (one goat was killed in the time I was there, in support of a kind of barn raising weeding event on communal land) they were still quite tall. One of the more compelling bits of evidence for the out of Africa hypothesis--that all humans populations are African in origin--is that there is more genetic diversity in that continent than any others. This is grossly evident by the wider range in body shape phenotypes.
I heartily await even deeper anthropological insights from Pr's Sailer & Ford.
Here's a chart. Americans were taller than northern Europeans before WWII. And now they are shorter. It seems a little chauvinistic to attribute that to immigration. Why is it chauvinistic? If you add millions of shorter people to the population, average or median height must decrease, mathematically. Right?
Jeez, you people must all not have kids. First thing that you learn when you have kids is their place on the growth chart. If they're at the 50th percentile when they're a year old, they will almost certainly be at the 50th percentile when they're 10; their potential height is practically predetermined from birth. Europeans were shorter than Americans before WWII because overall, European nutrition wasn't as good. If it were our food that affected our overall height that much, you'd think we'd be taller than before, thanks to all the bovine growth hormone we get in our beef. Unless you factor out the impact of immigrants from developing countries, the comparisons are useless.
Unless they were able to control fertility, which seems doubtful, there's no other explanation. Now, if you're willing to accept that 5 out 6 babies wil die, it's possible to posit that those who survive will have a good life.
Actually, many primitive societies DID control fertility by having the mother nurse each child until 3-4 years old. This generally lowered the mother's body fat to a level that her fertility was affected. By the time the next baby came the older child was old enough to walk around on his/her own.
This is why 2005 Americans are shorter than 2005 Belgians. Belgians eat a balanced diet of meat, and vegetables, and have good health care. Americans, on average, eat too much junk food, and have poor health care.
================================================ And this assertion is based on what scientific studies?
If we're talking stone-age California, it's probably not true that the hunter-gatherers had all that much leisure time, since the nuts discussed above are acorns, which require a tremendous amoung of work to prepare. But then the abundant shellfish, stream fish, and birds probably made up a large part of most early California diets. (There's a tendency to overgeneralize based on the native American population that was left alive to be studied by the early anthropologists as opposed to the SF Bay or Coastal tribes).
Actually acorns really aren't THAT difficult to prepare, though they do take more work than wild grass seeds which the Indians used in the early Holocene. They seem to have forced to acorn processing about 3-4000 years ago by increases in population density. Studies have shown that the prehistoric California Indians had hunted deer and waterfowl down to levels near what we see today. The large populations of wildlife seen by early European explorers in California were due to the fall-off of hunting pressure because of Indian population fall from European diseases.
This is apples and oranges. At the risk of sounding facetious, one cannot just compare statistics from 'the stone age' with those of a specific date (1800) and place (England) and expect them to have any validity whatsoever. 'The stone age' is a useless term which means almost nothing. It literally denotes the entire period from 1.6 million years ago (or even older) through 2000 BC (but that's just in Europe - the transition from 'stone' to 'metal' ages happened at different times in different places all around the world). Moreover, there was no one way of subsisting in the world in 'the stone age' nor one life style. A credible study could be made by comparing populations living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in a location with similar environmental factors to 19th century england. On the other hand, life expectancy, quality of life, diet, social structure, etc. are all highly debated in archaeological circles when you're talking about pre-modern (non-historical, prehistoric, STONE AGE) societies. I understand that Matt's not a specialist, but whoever has made this comparison ought to take a few archaeology classes before he makes a fool of himself.
================================================= Not totally disagreeing with you here, but I think a case can easily be made that the diet of ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers can be compared to contemporary empoverished agriculturalists. I think a non-specialist has misused the term "stone age". Agree that it would be better to have an apples to apples comparison to similar environments. Matt has made some real archaeological howlers in the past. I remember one post he had complaining about agricultural subsidies to farmers in the Plains and Southwest. He tried to make the point that most 19th century immigrants tried to cross those areas - where the Indians didn't even practice agriculture - to get to the good lands in California and Oregon where they did. Any knowledable person knows it is just the opposite: Indians didn't practice agriculture in California and Oregon and did on the Plains and in Southwest.
In 1800s England, why is life expectancy at 20 less than life expectancy at birth? That makes no sense. life expectancy is the number of remaining years you can expect to live. Here is some US data: High infant mortality rates can cause relatively low life expectancies at birth but not at all horrible life expectancies when you are 20.
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Heads in the Sand
Well, this partially depends on how one is defining "living standards". For example, there is a lot of reason to believe the hunter-gatherers during the African Late Stone Age (as with most hunter-gatherers not in contact with agriculturalists) suffer from little if any infectious disease.
Posted by jeb | October 28, 2007 3:52 PM