Yeah, because modern skeletons have the marks of heavy manual labour on them…
Dude, you’ve bought into a lie. We definitely work less than people who had to fight to exist from day to day.
We do not “definitely “ work less. Modern Research by Graber, Wolff , Moss Finley & Peter Garnsey found plenty of evidence to challenge that view.
I’m not at home in this field. I have looked at Non-Slave Labour in the Greco-Roman World by Garnsey, and can probably hop on from there, but would you mind providing more details on the sources, e. g. are you referring to the economist Richard D. Wolff? Any particular papers / DOIs you could provide?
Yeah, because modern skeletons have the marks of heavy manual labour on them…
Bro have you ever talked to anyone in the trades? They are all limping by 35.
Not everyone gets a do-nothing laptop job.
I am in the trades (Journeyman Millwright, former sailor and diesel mechanic), over 35 and am not limping.
It’s not standard for us to be that broken, that early. Most of the people who are, aren’t paying attention to how they are doing it.
Not everyone breaks themselves in the trades.
It’s not really an adequate comparison. I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, and modern people do indeed acquire specific chronic orthopedic ailments based on their occupation.
Most of these injuries are acquired from jobs where you repeat specific motions all day. It doesn’t really mean you’ve done hard labour, more that you’ve over used specific muscle groups and joints.
Btw I do agree with your general rebuttal, that any work back then was much more labour intensive. I just don’t know if that particular anthropological fact lends much weight to your argument.
You’d probably get better information examining the average age of the working male. From anecdotal experience, hard labour is a young mans game. I work in oil country, and I don’t ever have any old rough necks as patients. At least not one’s whole are still working.
It depends on when in history you are comparing from. For most of human history, humans as hunter gatherers worked on average only 3-8 hours each day.
Agrarian societies worked similar number of days each year, but work was heavily dependent on weather and seasons. It was the sudden shift to proto industrialisation and industrialisation that brought about an extreme increase to 60-80 hour work weeks, but in the spam of human history this is a very small minority.
- The working week in manufacturing since 1820 | How Was Life? Volume II : New Perspectives on Well-being and Global Inequality since 1820 | OECD iLibrary - https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/11e27aff-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/11e27aff-en
