Who can blame him?

Blessed lies lead us to misallocate billions preparing for attack from a Soviet Union that hasn't existed for a generation. They lead to ever costlier security scrambles against transitory terrorist tactics, although we know the tactic can and will change on a dime, and that every one of those dimes costs us billions we cannot afford. If we thought about it, we'd quickly realize that no nation can sustain that asymmetry. So we don't think about it.

The Navaho say you can't awaken a man who is pretending to sleep. Most of our blessed lies function to allow us to keep pretending to sleep.

Think science is immune to the blessed lie? Read our book. In Sex at Dawn (now available for pre-order at Amazon, by the way), we expose a slew of blessed lies that are believed (sort of) and promoted by the scientific establishment. Our examples range from sexuality to family structure to the origins of war to prehistoric quality of life to longevity.**

This weekend, The New York Times had an article about people in Manhattan who have convinced themselves of the health effects of aligning their diet with our prehistoric ancestors' diets. One guy insists on only eating grass-fed beef, raw—though he does use a fork.

With all due respect to these Bozos (which is hardly any), this is the sort of idiocy that gives Neanderthals a bad name. These guys might as well rent Flintstones costumes in the hopes that the polyester tiger skins will infuse them with prehistoric vigor.

Where to start? First off, grass-fed beef has little to do with the sorts of meat eaten 20,000 years ago, when ungulates were always moving. The fat content was a fraction of what it is today. Fire and cooking were in use as far back as 1.9 million years ago—300,000 years ago at the latest, so why this guy insists on going carpaccio is a mystery.

Then there's the question of which prehistoric people they're emulating. Many prehistoric people ate a lot of insects. No mention of bug-munching in the article. Others likely lived on mostly reindeer and seal blubber. Lots of rodents, most likely. Rotting flesh stolen from vultures. No eating of road-kill is discussed.

But these are just harmless goof-balls who are more into shocking their friends than in actually understanding how people lived before agriculture. My real gripe is with this paragraph:

Still, there is a “sharp contrast” between the strength and fitness of our distant ancestors and us, said Clark Larsen, a physical anthropologist at Ohio State University. “The male or female of 12,000 to 15,000 years ago will be considerably stronger and in better shape,” he said. Unfortunately, life was short: If you made it to age 30 or so, you had done well.

Prehistoric life was not short. This is a blessed scientific lie.

We explain this in much more detail in the book, but here's the misunderstanding in a nutshell.

• There was high infant mortality in prehistory. (How this compares to infant mortality in Medeival Europe or modern India and China is an interesting question we look at in the book, but no space for it here.)
• There are technical difficulties in distinguishing age of death beyond the early 30s, when one's last teeth are fully erupted from the jaw bone.
• These two factors combined with sloppy thinking to create the wide-spread "fact" that "if you made it to 30 or so, you had done well."

But it's bullshit! Nobody was considered "old" at 30 in prehistory, just as 30 year-olds aren't considered "old" among modern day hunter-gatherers, or in the Old Testament, where humans were allotted 70 years (three score and ten). People who lived beyond childhood often–even typically–lived into their 60s and 70s in prehistory. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and well known to specialists in anthropology, primatology, and archaeology.

So why does the nearly universal falsehood persist? Because it allows us to keep pretending to be asleep. Because it makes us feel like we've "come a long way, baby." We're so proud of ourselves for having doubled the average human life span that we can't bring ourselves, as a culture, to face the truth, which is that it's not at all clear that modern life is a significant improvement on prehistoric life for most people.

I hear you scoffers scoffing. But if you're so sure that what I'm saying is absurd, I challenge you to buy, borrow, or steal our book this summer and then write me explaining where our argument fails.

I don't think we're wrong; I think Hobbes was wrong. Prehistoric life was not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish or short. We continue to honor his lie because it serves our modern vanity and ancient ignorance.

* Twain said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."

** Sorry about the shameless plug, but when did I claim to possess shame?