And what do I mean by genuinely healthy? Well, imagine a remote
village or a mountain valley or a far island settlement very
difficult to get to, where there lived a thousand or perhaps ten
thousand people. Rarely fewer, rarely more. Among that small
population there were no medical doctors and no dentists, no drugs,
no vaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the isolation carried with
it illiteracy and precluded contact with or awareness of modern
science, so there was little or no notion of public hygiene. And
this was before the era of antibiotics. Yet these unprotected,
undoctored, unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and die from
bacterial infections; and the women did not have to give birth to 13
children to get 2.4 to survive to breeding age--almost all the
children made it through the gauntlet of childhood diseases. There
was also virtually no degenerative disease like heart attacks,
hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There were
few if any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren't any
aspirin in the entire place. Oh, and there was very little mortality
during childbirth, as little or less than we have today with all our
hospitals. And the people uniformly had virtually perfect teeth and
kept them all till death, but did not have toothbrushes nor any
notion of dental hygiene.
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