From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 15 2003 - 18:43:15 MDT
On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 05:22:40PM -0700, Ramez Naam wrote:
> Our hunter-gather ancestors frequently died of *famine*. They had
That's not clear. Existing H-G societies are good at limiting their
population, and with a wide variety of foodstuffs have pretty robust supplies.
A bad year just means they work harder. A really bad year might kill off some
of the elders and children.
> much higher levels of physical activity than is the norm for today.
Yeah, although possibly lower, or at least more relaxed, than farmers.
> They were at radically greater risk of death from infectious diseases
> than we are. They virtually never experienced heart disease, cancer,
The disease part isn't clear. They didn't live in close contact with animals,
they weren't crowded, they had good sanitation by default. Africa has lots of
natural parasties, but we quite possibly flourished quite well out of there,
like many transplant species today. The big plagues started after we started
sleeping with our pigs and chickens in dense concentrations. Like everything
else, the Chinese may have invented epidemics.
> those became risk factors. 75% of them were dead by age 18! So this
Cite for that number?
-xx- Damien X-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 15 2003 - 18:50:18 MDT