In fact for a population that was well surveyed and was rural (Lake District in the late 19th century) once infant mortality was past, life expectancy was around 60-62. Bismarck set the original German pensionable age at, I believe, 64, because this was the age at which mortality rates started to rise very rapidly.
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You mean high infant mortality rates.
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Yup. Mine too. Which is why I’m having some faintly suspicious sausages no one else will touch from the back of the fridge for breakfast. I’ll happily eat floor food as well, so long as the baby doesn’t get it first.
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Homo Donaldis.
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Yeah… without selective breeding and Neolithic agriculture, the odds that meat was on the menu every day or even most days is slim to none. These people didn’t keep livestock.
Hunting is fucking hard and energy intensive. Humans mainly got their meat from cadavers left behind by predators. What early humans ate isn’t that much of a mystery because their options were constrained.
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Subjecting the hard sciences to examination by the social sciences? Ooooh, that’d be a 
thread if I ever saw one…
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Not the hard sciences (as I said, I personally reject relativism) but scientists and their relations with the rest of society. It’s a big subject but, as we see with climate change, important.
Astronomy (is Pluto a planet? Canals on Mars?) is an example of a subject where social and psychological effects are important, and I doubt anybody would seriously argue against that.
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For example, the fact that homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, probably mostly on weekends.
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For some populations. Like lactose tolerance, there is a genetic predisposition to alcohol tolerance that varies in different parts of the world. Native Americans would be a good example of not being able to make good dietary use out of either cow’s milk or alcohol, which comes from being distantly descended from East Asians (ditto) and then even further removed geographically from those dietary staples for thousands of years.
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That’s true, and I often feel frustrated with life expectancy statistics because they don’t really represent what’s happening. However, in this case they do a great job showing us that things weren’t so great back then. The supposedly salutary effects of their outdoor lifestyle and primitive diet weren’t getting the job done.
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I totally agree with you. I was a sociology major myself and think this is a great idea. I was referencing how angry it makes a lot of lab scientists/engineers on the bbs that psychology, sociology, et al are called social sciences
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yes i do.
Eat the rich.
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We are believed to have what is, in evolutionary terms, a recent common ancestor. Wolves and dogs, cats and lions, can get by quite happily on similar diets.
It’s a varied field; there’s plenty of rigorous and useful examination of the influence of social factors on science and vice-versa, but there’s also a mountain of extreme PoMo bullshit (Barnes & Bloor, Latour, etc.).
It’s touched on in this thread:
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I like the way you think.
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Yeah, I hate lettuce, too.
(I kid. I agree with your post. But yeah, lettuce)
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The main problem with eating paleo is that “paleo” is a prefix - and one cannot eat a fucking prefix.
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