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Comment by MrEfficiency | Hacker News Reader

I can confirm I know more and likely am stronger than every hunter gatherer.

Hunter gatherers didnt know what chemicals to mix to create a battery, or use that battery to power magnets, and that if you power them in the correct order you can spin things, and with spinning, you have our modern way of moving energy.

I also lift weights, likely unbelievable weights that couldnt be sustained for a hunter gatherer due to lack of food.

Size doesnt matter as much as environment. I have an abundance of food and information, while this was scarce 10,000 years a go.

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Knowledge != intelligence. That little bit there basically blows away your first section completely.

The second is dubious. Ancient hunter gatherers were persistence hunters. Go walk for 50 miles a day for a few days and then carry the kill home and I’ll believe that you’re stronger.

Hell, for that matter go kill a mastadon and then carry the meat home. Watch out for wolves!

Intelligence says you don't carry the mastadon home, you take the tribe to the mastadon.

It’s not like carrying all your possessions to the mastadon is easy either.

It worked, though. A lot of stone age tribes for tens of thousands of years made a pretty good living hunting big game animals like mastodons. Taking a creature that large down can feed an entire tribe for days or even weeks. Makes it well worth the effort to move to it.

The idea of villages and more possessions than you can carry didn't happen until agriculture became a thing. The people that lived off big game hunting with stone age tools and no pack animals were set up for it.

Of course it works. We’re here.

I’m pushing back against OPs idea that humans weren’t agile for most of history. Hunter gatherers were about as tough as humans get.

I'd argue they were about like us, no more, no less. Hunting mastodons was actually very sophisticated technology - I mean, all they had were sticks and rocks, against a beast that could easily kill them. On the other hand, disease, malnutrition, and untreated injuries really dragged them down.

It's important to divide between history and pre-history, though - living conditions for stone age tribes were very different than for civilizations, which had agriculture and permanent structures and all the benefits and problems that go with those things.

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