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Did they not live and die in a way that at some fundamental level seems better than our way?

NO! Good Grief! You have never been hungry have you? I mean really hungry not just skipped a few meals hungry. Where you eat rotting food and leaves hungry. Never had tetanus. Your teeth worn down to nubs and no dental care. Frost bite. I could go on and on.

I have no desire to be married off at age twelve and share my husband with two or three other wives. Have a baby every couple of years and watch most of them die from simple illness or injury. Worn out and dead for the most part by age thirty. If I managed to avoid being killed or taken captive by my not so friendly neighbors. Not this kid. I have been there, seen that and I burned the T-shirt.

You go live and die like that if you wish. It sounds romantic. It is nasty, brutish and short.

a.cricket

Granted. But there seems to me a strange charm (and I assume competence enough not to starve half the year) in such a life in the wild, as opposed to stultifying in urbanity. A free life, wandering with one's family and friends, with no needs but the barest and a life where people sing and death means nothing.

But I have never starved for a week on the hunt, either. But such disregard for pain, and such revelry! It seems as though, despite all the benefits of our way of life, we lose something. To me, anyhow.