alt Hacker News> 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.
An hunter-gathers were probably a lot more robust to that than modern people.
Think about it: if what you say were that big of an issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out before getting to us.
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Qwertious • last Sunday at 8:46 AM
Hunter-gatherers didn't have birth control; if you have 5 kids and half of them die, you've still maintained your population.
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UncleMeat • last Sunday at 12:58 PM
Humanity almost did die out. All living humans are descendants from a relatively small funnel.
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There’s no reason to assume that. Antibiotics and anti-parasitic drugs have only been around for a century or so. That’s not enough time for our immune systems to have lost the ability to fight them.
>Think about it: if what you say were that big of an issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out before getting to us.
Most wild animals are riddled with parasites and it’s common for for animals in captivity to have 2x the lifespan of their wild counterparts.
You don’t need to make it to 70 to raise children. If 50% of people make it to 30 and each person has an average of 5 kids the math works out fine for population growth.