this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Because for most of it, we were living our lives, planting the trees that gave us food, protecting the animals we ate from other predators, and just living off the land. We spread over the entire world and shaped the land to better suit us
We weren't primitive, for millennia we turned most of the world into a paradise built for us, then tore it down in a few centuries and are now flirting with extinction
That is a lovely picture you are painting but there is certainly no evidence we "built a paradise" for ourselves. There would still be famine, struggle for resources, war and uncountable problems in the daily struggle for survival.
It's not as simple as "past good, present bad".
There was always struggle over territory. Generally non lethal, just like predators facing off
There was no war. War requires agriculture - an army cannot march or camp without food constantly being shipped in
Famine also is usually due to agriculture - monocultures and short-sighted management of the environment.
There were hard times. Droughts happened, sickness happened, people were not always very cool to each other. These things weren't done on institutional scale, because the only institutions were meetings between groups occasionally sending representatives
The more I learn about ancient history, the more I realize we fucked everything up societally. Technology is great, and yes we have a lot less mothers dying in childbirth... Except we didn't for most of recorded history (and we're backsliding), because literal childbirth in the woods was better than delivery in a hospital until a century ago
It is very likely that there has always been war. Those have been documented even between chimpanzees and those fights absolutely were lethal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
This was very interesting. I have not heard of this before. A good example to not get too caught up in this "nature is perfect" thinking.