Did humans 10000 years before us live better off or worse than modern day humans?

Question

Consider differences in food availability, nutrition, social life, family life, medicine, health care, or any other aspects

Answer 1

They didn't know any difference.  Are we living better than someone in 12,000 AD.  some ways yes, some ways no.  There was no property tax but had to fight others to keep your cave, tent, shack.  Tradeoffs.  Some people like living close to nature, some don't. It didn't matter if you lost your teeth as long as someone chewed your food for you. I'm sure people weren't as judgemental as today. As long as you have love, you have a good life.

Answer 2

Infant mortality higher then any third world nation, no dental care, vaccines, thyroid, dysentery, smallpox. Yes, it was an absolute paradise. One tried and true cure was to left baby urine sit for several weeks, then pour it over yourself to kill the lice.

Answer 3

Overall, it's quite the same, because they had their own recreation while we have our own recreation. It's quite the same.

Answer 4

Who knows? Only they would, certainly some had great nutrition, social, family life, medicine evolution is questionable to me, probably had it just as bad or good as we do now.  We all have to deal with the same stuff anyways, maybe they had it slightly worse and we have it slightly better but just because of that it doesn't mean that we are any happier then they were.

Answer 5

Modern day humans are characterized by a huge disparity between wealthy and poor.  For better or for worse, that didn't generally exist 10,000 years ago.  In the develped world, unquestionably people are better off today by many standards, but we have many social ills that were unthinkable a hundred centuries ago.  Drug addiction, suicide, eating disorders, etc.

My life is certainly better than it would have been, but understand that half of our planet's population exists on less than two dollars a day.  For a very large group of people, this life is filled with misery.  Native people who lived outside of the global capitalist economy seemed to have been pretty happy, and many who have been sucked into global capitalism seem to have been victimized by the process.

Answer 6

You know they did not.

Answer 7

Lack of medical care was probably the worse thing for ancient peoples. I study a slightly later period of prehistory (the New Stone Age) and skeletal remains show rickets,malnutrition, tooth absesses that could be fatal,unhealed injuries (like the total loss of a kneecap causing an infection that went into the bone),broken bones set poorly,hydrocephalus that would deform a child's skull before killing it.

   the majority of children died before 5,and the average adult lifespan was 30-35, although as the bronze age came this went up slightly--I know of several 60-odd year olds that were found.

I have seen several skulls which were also trepanned--roundels of bone cut out--in an early form of brain surgery. Whether this was for religious reasons or to release 'evil spirits' causing migraine/mental illness, I don't know. But surprisingly one or two of these people survived!

Answer 8

Cro-Magnon cavemen lived to an average age of 25-30, usually dying of exposure, hunting injuries or infection!

In order for our species to survive, women had to start giving birth at about age 12, and once per year, in order to have about 3 children survive, out of about 15, by the time she died!

You decide!

Answer 9

Written history only goes back 5000 years.

Answer 10

They had no taxes,

And did not fight over taxis.

Hunting was in-season, every season. The frozen tundra was a natural freezer. You did need to dig it out though, and cover it with marking stones to keep out poachers.

The real question is:

Will we be better off 10,000 years from now? Will we be a two planet species, assuring our continued existence? Without an atmosphere, Mars is out of the question. Bomb it with comets of carbon dioxide ice and it would still dissipate since there is not magnetosphere to protect the atmosphere.

Answer 11

Depends on how you measure that.

For example:  are we victims of plague?  No.  And we *do* have antibiotics (at least for a little while longer).  But at the same time, ancient humans didn't die from things like eating to much mcdonalds.

Interestingly enough, some hunter gatherer societies, like the !Kung of africa, actually have shorter "work-weeks" than that of the modern day human.  So where we consider 40 hours weekly of working normal, some of them only hunt and gather for an average of 20 hours a week.  That seems pretty sweet to me.