Story What the Most Natural Life Should Have Been Like

[DepressedDude]

I've been think a lot about life lately and trying to figure out if there's any point or meaning to it - which I'm yet to find. So I started thinking about how the most natural lifestyle would have been and if there was any point to it.

It turns out humans should have originally only lived close to the equator, which is mostly in a tropical climate. The temperature is ideal year round and there's plenty of fruits growing like mangoes, bananas, avocados and coconuts.

The days would have revolved around collecting fruit/berries, firewood, building shelters and playing in the ocean with makeshift surfboards made from tree husks (I've seen old ancient carving style drawings of this). Maybe also playing catch or football type games with coconuts and other objects laying around.

I like to think of this existence I'm describing as the most ideal living conditions for humans, which I think would be best if it didn't involve hunting and inflicting harm/suffering on another creature.

That's the vegan version but I do however think there would have also been many fish that would wash up on the shore or easily be caught with a palm frond or something that could be left to suffocate before being cooked. Not ideal imo but better than hunting land dwelling animals and slaughtering them. (Which probably did happen too).

As humans started increasing in numbers and getting more advanced with clothing and building shelters they ventured out to explore, but stupidly went too far north/south. As the climate got worse and they ventured more inland the amount of fruits/vegetables decreased and humans would have survived primarily on hunting animals.

This is where a lot of humans probably started getting miserable and depressed. They were cold, hungry and had to kill stuff (or witness it) all the time just to survive.

So basically if we had to be here on Earth as a test or something that's what I think life should have been like ideally. However, with everything I've realized during my depression I think human life should have never existed in the first place.

 

[Ash]

I hate to dispell your romantic notion of prehistory but homo sapiens evolved from omnivores and, like many other species, have always been thus.

And I'm yet to read any evidence suggesting that the humans who eventually left Africa were any more or less content than their ancestors. The different races evolved from each other, adapting to the climate and geography. Nomadic people wouldn't have persisted somewhere that made them unhappy. That we spread to every continent only suggests that we are good at travelling and adapting and there's no right or wrong place to live (just as there's no better or worse race).

 

[LaVieEnRose]

Meat consumption was a driving force in human evolution. In other words, humans didn't evolve to eat meat. They evolved BY eating meat.

They liked meat a little too much because they helped drive a lot of megafauna (large animals) to extinction, thus screwing themselves out of solid food resources (not that they had modern ideas of conversation and resource management or much pragmatic freedom to care about such things) especially here in North America where only 15,000 years ago megafaunal mammalian diversity rivaled or even exceeded that of the Serengeti.

In the earliest times things were probably socially more uniform. Then came very long stretches of social disparity which of course continues today. But today I feel that disparity tended to be taken as a matter of course generally over the course of history which of course is definitely not the case nowadays, which I feel is a source of a lot of emotional problems that may not have been as prominent despite a worse overall material standard of living.

 

[leavingthesoultrap]

Most of today's fruit and vegetables dont exist in nature. They were cultivated by humans with selective breeding. Wild fruit is small and sour or bitter. Pre agricultural society would have to resort to hunting there's no way around it.
The only fruit that exists in the wild that you listed is coconut but it's shell is so hard that it would be quite difficult to break it without sharp metal tools. Lots of work for a little nutritional reward.
Pics of wild mango, avocado and banana: