Data check on Harari: hunter-gatherer life expectancy was 21-37, technology made us live far longer
AryHHAry · x · 2026-09-07
Responding to Yuval Noah Harari's claim that technology eased individual lives but made civilization vastly more complex, a poster pushes back with demographic data:
- Gurven & Kaplan (2007) estimate life expectancy at birth for hunter-gatherers at 21-37 years; survivors could reach 60-70s, but infant/child mortality was tens to hundreds of times higher than modern high-income populations.
- Burger, Baudisch & Vaupel (PNAS 2012) show modern mortality decline exceeds even the gap between hunter-gatherers and wild chimpanzees.
- The quote comes from Harari's July 2026 conversation with Tom Parker of the FT podcast The Next Five.
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