But my grandmother, who was born in a hide tent, reminded me it could be tough, even when everything is going great. I asked about the camp she and my grandfather used to live in, and she said she wouldn’t want to live there again. One year before my uncle was born it snowed on the fourth of July.

Horses were the only way to get anywhere, and once she had to drag my uncle on a homemade sled deal to get somewhere in the snow.

People romanticize the life; even my grandparents would take my brother and me into the mountains in the summer to fish and go berry picking. Now thinking about it I was stabbed with the desire to be at that camp again. Then I looked outside at the freezing rain. Maybe I’ll wait until summer.

It helps to think of modern humans as zoo animals. That’s the analogy John Durant makes in The Paleo Manifesto. Regular feedings and an environment devoid of predators certain increase average lifespan, but zoo animals aren’t exactly thriving in their enclosures.

Nonetheless there are major qualitative differences between simple HGs (without food storage) and the peansant-agrarian societies which replaced them; and there is no real doubt that HGs were (simple HGs do not now exist, nor have they for *many* decades, making recent fieldwork potentially very misleading) – on average – happier, taller, healthier, better fed, less disease-riddled, longer-lived and they have *a lot* more leisure than peasants.

HGs were not living in utopia, but these are solid advantages.

The following article (which has many references) was written before I came a Christian and anti-modernist (I was a kind of agnostic libertarian), but I still regard the basic facts as correct:

https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/evolpsych.html

Very true. Many modern intellectuals who long for a primitive society would not be at the top of it — and might die soon after becoming part of it. Nonetheless, intellectuals are reasonable to long for a primitive society — because there are things worth dying for, and there are things worth being at the bottom of a hierarchy for.

That gave me a dark chuckle. You’re probably right on that best strategy.

Aliens coming to your world that are that much more advanced than you are, presuming you can even understand the interaction in those terms, are a mortal threat whether or not they claim to be or even are good willed. Getting rid of them and, to the best of your limited understanding, trying not to attract more of them and/or disposing of them in such a way as not to make it obvious what you’ve done, is job one.

If you’re close enough to them to understand some of their stuff, great. Learn it and wait.

If you’re close enough to interact more evenly but still well behind, that might actually be the most dangerous time- the time your culture is most likely to succumb or disintegrate altogether under the pressure/opportunities/blandishments of the new one.

If you’re close in tech and particularly capable and your alien patrons not too acquisitive, you might be all right. For example, Japan. It didn’t look it for a while, but India both had elites able to profit from allying their states to Britain and the capacity to develop a new elite under its aegis capable of eventually guiding a new Indian state not wholly disassociated from its roots. OTOH, most of the Muslim world had been on terms of equality if not superiority and dominance wrt Europe at one point and was still heavily broken by a comparatively brief period of colonial encounter with a stronger Europe. Plainly, no guarantees. What Ottoman vizier or Andalusian prince would have expected his society to fall from colonial master to colonized subject in any amount of centuries?

Sorry – a bit beyond scope there. Sometimes one just has random thoughts.

If you’re as isolated as the Sentinelese, probably best to kill the stranger and hope for the best. Definitely a good idea to have a strong taboo against eating him. Some wise chief/shaman/medicine-maker of the past hopefully convinced them that the strangers aren’t either men or good eating-animals. Think they were either would be a people-ending mistake. Good luck to them.

It has been said that they eat strangers, although I don’t think there is clear evidence of that. Eating strangers could be very dangerous because of exposure to new pathogens. Their best strategy is “Kill the stranger but do not eat him”.

I have wearied of the non-clinical use of the suffix “phobia”. I’m not sure many people have a pathological fear of foreigners or any of the other things to which it is so readily attached. It starts to seem like a compulsive mental habit of a child-like society to keep using these 2-minute hate verbal constructions.

And, of course, the corresponding xenophilia trait is just as weird and far from a solid foundation, but is never cited.

Then again, I would have thought a friendliness to others combined with a desire to hold one’s own space a healthy mix. Apparently not.

Romanticizing it has a long history, whether or not for political reasons. On some level, Rousseau and Marx may have been constructing thought experiments, but their elaborate [in Marx's case very] theorizing still rested on total, absurd, myths about the human past. For less overtly political reasons, we have had romanticizing of HG since the postwar era of the affluent society. Star Trek, normally in love with technocracy and the people who thrive in it, has had its moments. The original series mostly stuck to romanticizing earlier modes of civilized, settled life, basically anything without too much computer coordination. Deep Space 9 actually did one in which Captain Sisko confronted a lost settlement of human technophobes seeking a cultish HG/early farmer ideal, with the covert backing of some in the Federation. They were the villains, but given sympathy. I have more sympathy now than I did when I saw it 20 years ago.

I think we’re finally past the point where I think technology is going to go too far.