Comment by yesharah on An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment · 2019-06-19T21:12:37.124Z · LW · GW

I'm skeptical of the value of comparing the !Kung people as anything approximating the Ancestral Environment. They used to be hunter-gatherers in a much more fertile area. They got pushed to their present location by cattle farmers, and now they aren't even especially mobile. Their current lifestyle is halfway between the lifestyle they adapted for their more hostile desert living conditions and the impatient, frustrated sedantism of a culture that is frequently no longer functionally mobile to support itself by that means (leading to several almost reservation-like developments). They don't even represent very closely their own ancestral traditions of as recently as 200 years ago. Their diet has almost completely changed, their hunting and gathering methods have changed, and all of that has been exacerbated by recent immobility.