Prehistoric life versus technology

Considering two big assumptions that are often made about prehistoric humans and the value of technological progress

Mar 01, 2025

Today, I want to talk about two assumptions that I was taught and that I see as underlying many of our beliefs around progress and technology: the assumption that modern humans live better lives that prehistoric humans and that this is because technological progress is good. Although I see more people questioning whether progress is inherently good—and especially whether technological progress is inherently good—I still see these assumptions laying at the root of many of the biggest problems we’re dealing with today.

I’m about to make a some big claims in this post, and most of it is based on reading I’ve done over many years. Rather than find links for every individual claim, I’ve listed a couple of my “suggested reading” resources below.

The story I was taught

The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils are at least a couple hundred thousand years old. One resource I found said the oldest fossils were about 300,000 years old, while another said less than 200,000, but in any case, evidence suggests that our species has survived on earth at least 200,000 years. Meanwhile, agriculture has been around for approximately 10,000 years, give or take a couple thousand years. With the rise of agriculture, towns began to pop up to support the trade of goods.

With the rise of towns, more skillsets were needed to support the people living in those towns. Some people focused on growing food, and some people focused on meeting the ever-increasing needs of the city populations: market places were developed to trade goods, currency was developed for more efficient and consistent trading of goods, writing was developed to help with accounting for the trade of goods, governments and militaries were created, etc. It seems that this new lifestyle led to a world in which people had to work a lot more, but supposedly the trade-off was that this new life came with more comfort and security.

Obviously, a lot happened in those 10,000 years: major world religions were developed; lots of wars were fought; there were periods of scientific enlightenment, as well as losses of knowledge and understanding; there were global explorations by different cultures; and, of course, there were technological advances. However, in general, the story that I was raised with and that seems to be fairly consistent among the people I interact with, is that progress, and especially scientific and technological progress, has ensured that our lives have continued to improve over those last 10,000 years. Of course, there have been ups and downs and not everyone benefited equally, but overall, the story goes, humanity improved as civilization progressed throughout these last 10,000 years.

Most importantly, according to the story I was taught, a few hundred years ago, we got the European Enlightenment which helped usher in the Industrial Revolution and the scientific enlightenment. With those, we were able to shift from farming and other forms of back-breaking manual labor to cushier and cushier office jobs. Productivity increased and poverty—which had been a big problem for most of those 10,000 years—began to decrease.

We kept seeing an increase in comfort and security, which is how we could tell that technological progress was benefiting us. And we wanted that comfort and security. The people who had comfort and security wanted more (which should possibly make us question the validity of this story) and those who lacked comfort and security wanted the jobs and money that would help them establish comfort and security.

Some problems with the logic of this story

I’m on board with the idea that, at least for European descendants, life is better today than it was 100 years ago or even a few thousand years ago (defining “better” as more comfortable and more secure). However, that is a very short timespan when compared to how long humans have been on this planet, and the fact that things have improved for many people across that short timespan does not necessarily or automatically mean that life today is better than it was 15,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago. Additionally, just because life may have improved over that short timespan for many people around the world, it does not follow that life improved for most or all people.

I’ve also seen a lot of people make assumptions that because they would find a prehistoric life to be difficult and deadly, then it must mean that life today is better. In reality, mostly what that means is that we don’t have the tools and knowledge to survive, but that’s not the same as our lives today being better.

And of course, there’s the assumption that because we have technological progress, it’s proof that we’re smarter than our ancient ancestors. For example, “cavemen” are often depicted as grunting imbeciles ruled by testosterone, and it’s often suggested that ancient humans couldn’t have been smart enough to do things like build pyramids by themselves, so they must have had help from some sort of higher beings (i.e. aliens). I’ve even seen people assume that hunter-gatherers must not have been very smart because it took them hundreds of thousands of years to figure out something “simple” like cultivating crops.

What if the story is wrong?

First, the people we refer to as “cavemen” were hunter-gatherers who were likely very similar to the hunter-gatherer peoples who still exist today in pockets around the world. There are lots of indications—based on what we’re learning of these existing communities and based on what recent archaeology is revealing about more ancient cultures—that these lifestyles can be more egalitarian, less stressful, allow for significantly more free time, provide greater levels of human connection and support, and may be happier and more content than modern civilization. Estimates are that people in these communities can spend less than 20 hours per week looking for food, which averages to be less than three hours per day.

In general, people in these communities only “work” a few hours a day, and as is pointed out in the book Sandtalk, much of that “work” is actually activities that we now do as leisure activities, such as hunting, fishing, and crafting.

Meanwhile, modernity and technological progress have come with a steep price for too many of us. For example:

We have greater rates of anxiety, depression, and chronic disease.
We are increasingly stressed out and fearful about the world.
Most so-called “comforts” have not made us happier or even more comfortable. They’ve left us more sedentary, and they somehow leave us wanting more stuff, more convenience and more distractions, in the hopes that if we can just get enough we’ll somehow be happier.
We’re all overworked and don’t have enough free time, and with each technological invention we often end up with more pressure to be more and more productive.
We have enough nuclear weapons to kill almost everyone on earth, and we are now figuring out how to add AI to weapons systems so that we can more efficiently kill more people, as well as more efficiently surveil them.
The Industrial Revolution, the discovery of electricity, and the use of fossil fuels as an energy source all directly led to the current climate and ecological crises that are putting our communities, lifestyles, and lives as risk.
We are literally in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, which seems to have been triggered entirely by human activity and mainly by technological progress.

My conclusions

For nearly 200,000 years (and maybe longer) humans lived on this planet in hunter-gatherer communities, and recent science is finding that these communities may have actually lived comparatively good lives. Then, we got agriculture, and over the course of a few thousand years, we created a world in which people are overworked and overstressed, and we have triggered the mass extinction of other species and possibly even our own.

Yes, this is a vast oversimplification. But it’s what goes through my mind now whenever I hear about the virtues of progress.

When people talk about technology and progress improving lives, they’re often comparing today’s world to that of a couple hundred years ago. If we’re looking at that time span, then yes, in many ways, life is better (at least for people in Western cultures). However, when we take into account the threat of climate change, the other existential threats brought about by technology, and the fact that we’ve triggered a mass extinction event, then even making our comparison over that shorter timespan raises big issues.

But if we take into account all of the problems the whole world is facing and compare them to what life was like for hunter-gatherers from over 10,000 years ago, then the belief that life is better now becomes just that, a belief. I have read too many compelling arguments at this point about prehistoric life to assume that life is better today than it was long ago.

Let me be clear: I also do not believe that because I’ve read some compelling arguments that it means we should give up on modern life and try to turn every city dweller into a hunter-gatherer. Most of us, including me, would be miserable and probably die pretty fast if we tried to do such a thing.

Moreover, just because lives of hunter-gatherer communities may have been a lot better than the current stories we hear about “our caveman ancestors,” that does not mean that hunter-gatherer lifestyles didn’t also have problems that we now know how to address today. For example, I’m a big fan of how successfully we’ve reduced infant mortality and improved the odds that a woman will survive child birth. I love that I don’t have to worry about freezing to death in the winter and knowing that, no matter how hot it gets outside, my food will stay safe for me to eat in the refrigerator.

However, there are a lot of lessons that we could be learning from how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived (and from how many more recent indigenous cultures lived). Although I have my own thoughts on some of these lessons, I have more reading and learning I want to do before I raise any of them. For now, I think the big take-away I’d like people to get from this post is this:

If we continue to make blanket assumptions that technological progress is good, that life has improved, and that we are better off now than our distant ancestors, then not only do we close the door to many solutions that could make us happier and healthier, but we will also continue to increase the number and severity of problems we have in this world.

Learning about how successful hunger-gatherer lifestyles can be was turning point for me in how I view the world and many of the very big problems we face. It forced me to question and challenge a lot of the assumptions that I’d been raised with, and in doing so, not only did I better understand the root cause of many issues we’re facing today, but the possibilities for a whole new and better world opened up to me.

What in the world is the problem?

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