alt Hacker NewsThat is a beautiful anecdote, but I don't see what we could reasonably generalize from that. It's fairly well established that access to good medical care and a certain degree of wealth make us happier.
Could a life radically and willfully different in many ways turn out to be better for most of us (which is critically what you claimed before)? It's certainly possible, given how few people take this route, but an appeal to nature is just not super convincing, unless you can back it up with data.
I can't help but notice you did not engage with how 40% of kids dieing and another 20% of us getting killed by some member of the cherished tribe could possible lead to high levels of life satisfaction. As far I can tell, on the whole, the good old days were cruel and rosy retrospection is just that.
The "miserable" existence ascribed by modern day humans to past human life is colored by their modern day psychological profile. If they were born and raised at that environment their psychological profile would be very different. A modern day human can be easily traumatized by something that past humans would consider trivial. Sure death was more common, possibly even violence, but that would not mean people were less happy. Satisfaction in human psychology has a certain profile, and that profile mainly follows the things i talked about. Close human relationships in small cohort groups, perception of agency, among a few other important factors. things that are missing among many citizens of modern day societies world wide. My point is that on average if you performed a statistical analysis of how happy people were, the claim is that they were happier back then then now.