alt Hacker NewsHard 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.
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insects, predator animals, cuts+bacteria all seem like quite hard-to-avoid disease vectors. we can spread disease quickly these days, but there are no shortage of ancient diseases you could've come across in a small hunter-gatherer society
I believe the modern world creates a lot of mental health problems, loneliness, and unhappines, but it's absolutely physically safer and more survivable (and more comfortable) for a huge percentage of the developed world. (It creates those mental problems unnecessarily, given the level of technology we have, but deeply baked into our fairly-antisocial individualistic culture)
>Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world
Traded neolithic goods regularly crossed continents. If an axe head can cross the continent then so can a microscopic disease.
Parent specifically called out antibiotics, which are for bacterial infections, not diseases. Coupled with the increased number of things to step on or get cut by means you really need them.
>Hard to catch a disease when it’s always the same 15 people around you, with no communication to the outside world.
There’s plenty of bacteria hanging out in the dirt, water, the animals you eat, and on your own skin. Add in the parasites, and zoonotic viruses and it’s not very hard at all to catch a disease even as a solitary hermit in the wild.
>factory farms
Didn’t need factory farms for smallpox. Many animals live in large herds, which were larger in the past. If you read accounts from the 18th and early 19th century there are many reports of squirrel migrations involving hundreds of millions of squirrels in relatively small areas.