Comparison of Past and Present Societies

The current modern environment and society which we are living in is very different to the hunter-gatherer society in which people hunted for their food, in our modern society we don’t need to hunt for food anymore because we have people who do this for us, for example farmers. We can order our shopping to be delivered to our house instead of moving around and getting it ourselves, can order a meal to our house without moving, we are very different from early homo sapiens and homo erectus who I spoke about earlier. Early homo sapiens lived as hunter-gatherers (Tattersall, I. (2009)), when we lived a hunter-gatherers there was no ordering takeaways, they hunted, gathered and collected their food. There is a massive difference between our current society and how we were when we first evolved into homo sapiens. Most people now live in buildings such as houses or apartments, which are normally situated in large cities or towns in these houses you can often find things which can be bad for the humans and the skeleton such as chairs and artificial light, these things are used daily and we don’t realise that these things are actually bad for us. Hunter gatherers lived differently to us, All hunter–gatherers build some kind of housing however it was built from locally sourced material such as mud and organic materials, they also stayed places which would have benefitted them (Smith, 2003). 

From our current society we have created a lot of useful, powerful and positive things. We have created many things which have helped us with our health, information and lifestyle. We can now keep people alive for much longer because of medication and surgery’s we can now give and perform. Patients with cardio-vascular problems are more likely nowadays to live much longer than somebody who had the same problem 300 years ago, this is because our society has grown its medical capabilities and given us new medicines such as penicillin found by alexander flemming in 1928, 

By increasing our knowledge in health and understand human life better, we have been able to extend life and make life expectancy higher. Its not just our medical capabilities that we have expanded, it is also other technologies we are improving as well, such as applications on phones and laptops. We can now use technology and our phones to track our health, this wasn’t available 300 years ago because our technology evolution has happened very quick and has bought a lot in one time. One of the biggest technologies we currently have right now is Artificial intelligence, this can help us with all sorts of things, it can help with medical needs, information and creating goods. AI is a great technology made, AI is the ability for computers to have almost human intelligence, it can be used for all different things. So, our society and environment have bought along great things, however with great things it has bought bad things, such as health issues such as obesity and musculoskeletal disorders such as osteoporosis.

References

Tattersall, I. (2009). Becoming modern Homo sapiens. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2(4), 584.

Smith, C. S. (2003). Hunter–gatherer mobility, storage, and houses in a marginal environment: An example from the mid-holocene of wyoming

World health organisation (2018) retrieved from https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight