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gjm comments on Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I am not a big fan of noble savage theory. Seems to me the lives of ancient humans were more likely to be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" than "happy, fit, sexy, proud". There are still some stone-age tribes around, you can take a look :-/
Going back to sport, there are some primal crossfit versions which basically try to emulate prehistoric "exercise" -- you run, but not on roads or trails, you lift, but boulders instead of iron, you carry logs, climb trees, etc.
However I think you're mixing up different things. There's a hardwired pleasure in movement (which many people managed to suppress quite successfully nowadays); there is the competition aspect into which competitive sports like soccer (or boxing) plug into; there is the general fit = sexy linkage, so weightlifting is popular; and dancing is either pleasure in movement or foreplay with clothes on. You are not going to find a single activity which satisfies everything in here.
At this point, any tribe still living anything like a stone-age lifestyle is ipso facto very unusual and so shouldn't be expected to be representative of actual stone-age lifestyles back in the Stone Age when everyone was living them.
(This remark is not original to me; I have a vague feeling I saw it years ago in a book by C S Lewis.)
A fair point, though I'm not sure I accept it fully. Yes, certain groups of people progressed to civilization while other groups did not. That, on the face of it, makes them different. However the jump to the conclusion that their lifestyle (and the degree of happiness and sexiness) back in the stone-age days was significantly different looks very tenuous to me.
That conclusion would be both too confident and in the wrong direction. The right conclusion would be: We aren't entitled to much confidence that other groups, back in the Stone Age, had lifestyles similar to theirs now.
Hm. At this point I think we'll need to distinguish lifestyle which is observable patterns of behaviour, and intangibles like "happy and proud".
We clearly don't have a clue about those intangibles (other than what we know about generic baseline humans) since we have any data. But lifestyle is largely determined by your surroundings and your technology. If you live, say, in the veldt (like the Bushmen) or in the tropical forest (like the Andamanese) and only have stone-age technology, there isn't much variation on the lifestyle available.
The same surroundings and technology could be compatible with hunting/gathering or primitive agriculture. With a rigid social structure where everyone has a precisely defined and immutable place or with near-frictionless social mobility. With a society obsessively dedicated to serving and placating ancestral spirits or one unencumbered by such superstitions. With nuclear families, or extended families of several dozen living together, or no overt family structure at all (though the latter is probably psychologically unrealistic). With a culture of working as hard as possible in order to accumulate status-enhancing possessions, or one of doing the least possible and enjoying one's leisure. Etc., etc., etc.
In any case, the point at issue actually was intangibles like "happy and proud", no?