These commonalities exist among disparate societies, isolated from one another, because they arise from foraging itself. These behavioral and cognitive patterns persist because they work in the social world of foreagers, whatever the physical environment. Finally, because these cognitive and behavioral patterns have been integral to the experience of our species for hundreds of thousands of years, they live on within us, having shaped our basic social and political disposition. End quote. Okay, point number two. The lives of hunter-gatherers are not nearly as bad as we have been led to believe, and in fact, they likely enjoy a higher quality of life, better health, and stronger social ties than most people in modern urbanized societies. I'm using present tense here because there are still hunter-gatherers in the world today, and a lot of what I'm talking about is a mixture of evidence from anthropologists in, say, the 19th century, going and spending time with hunter-gatherers bands that have now sadly been lost. Also more contemporary accounts of people spending time with hunter-gatherers groups who still exist in places like Africa and in the Amazon jungle, but also evidence that we have from anthropology, not anthropology archaeology, excuse me, from the remains of people from this time, and we can infer things from how they live. So yeah, the tenses I'm using throughout this will get a bit confusing because sometimes I'm talking about, you know, 100,000 years ago, sometimes I'm talking about accounts from actually hunter-gatherers that exist now, but really the lessons learned are the same. So you may be thinking, you know, these sort of primitive people, hunter-gatherers, only live to be 30 years old, 35 years old, as is commonly quoted, and that short lifetime was a constant fight for survival against a cruel natural world. This is unfortunately still a common narrative, but it actually dates back to a 17th century philosopher who had no contact with these so-called primitive peoples. Thomas Hobbes is the man who famously proclaimed that life before the state was solitary, poor, nasty, bruise-ish, and short. Fire from a reliable scientific source. This infamous description is more like propaganda. It says far more about the dominant paradigm of 17th century high society in Europe than it does about the indigenous forerunners, indigenous foreagers who still occupied large parts of the world at this time. Christopher Ryan spends much of his book debunking the standard narrative around prehistory, and what he calls the narrative of perpetual progress, which says that modern society is the best time to be alive and things will continually get better.