Many people did choose to live as hunter gatherers all over the world, until they were universally slaughtered and subjugated. We don't really know if industrial societies lead to more fullfilling lives or not, because they clearly lead to better and more expansive armies that quickly destroy anyone trying to live outside of that.

Stone age hunter-gatherers had better lives than stone-age farmers, assuming that they had enough land to hunt/gather on. Modern farming is usually far easier than modern hunting/gathering, although if you go far enough north you'll find that hunting is still the only viable option.

A lack of antibiotics wasn't sufficient reason to stay in western society for those members of the Pintupi Nine and other hunter gather families that came in, looked about, and left again.

Some can't imagine life without antibiotics, others can't fathom living with everything else that comes with it.

> You first.

He wasn't talking about going back, he was talking about staying.

> And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.

I don't recall where I read this, but (probably hundreds of years ago) some explorer in Africa was on a boat with some hunter-gatherers. A bloated, rotting dead rat floated by, they picked it up, said "yum" and dug in. They didn't get sick. I've also read some speculation that (initially) fire wasn't needed so much for cooking meat, because hunter-gatherers can (and did) accomplish the same effect by letting meat rot a little. Fire was more useful for vegetables.

So actual hunter gatherers probably had less need for antibiotics than a modern person thrust into a similar situation.

Indeed!

Antibiotics and Insulin - those two things have saves untold lives.

Before about 1920, the difference between rich and poor and the likelihood to recover from disease had more to do with ability to rest and diet.

The rich and poor alike died to tuberculosis (which was often a death sentence until antibiotics), simple cysts, all sorts of very basic bacterial infections killed in droves.

At the risk of sidetracking this further - it was only after insulin where the idea that healthcare could be somewhat that could be a right became somewhat reasonable (before the late gilded age, doctors often did as much harm as good) - every lifesaving innovation we have made sense, were often very modest amounts of money is the difference between life and death make that argument stronger.

You can’t survive as s hunter gatherer in the modern world.

To be fair, antibiotics are needed much more now that we have billions of hosts these organisms can evolve on rapidly.

Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world; and no factory farming that incubates most of these diseases.

Regarding your reference to how brutal and never-ending work was; As far as we know, many European medieval farmers had 1500-1800 working hours per year. It’s also a bit gloomy to assume the household was run by two parents and their kids - often, grandparents were colocated and helped until they couldn’t. What you‘ve described was certainly the case during famines and war, but not a permanent state.

Maybe it's a herd immunity thing or something and others are keeping me safe, but I'm 41 and Ive never taken an antibiotic and neither has anyone else in my family to my knowledge. I still can't figure out if it's the chicken or the egg.. have I never been sick because I don't take part in the medical system, or do I not take part because I've never been sick.. Then again last time my cuticle got infected I sterilized a knife and drained it myself. My friend said he had something similar and they gave him an antibiotic yet DIDNT drain it until it got worse and then they just did what I did. But at least they got to sell some antibiotics.