I've read Marshall Sahlins too. It's very nice if you want half your kids to die before the age of 5 and you yourself don't mind being old at 30 and dead at 45 of diseases that could be be avoided by vaccination or cured by antiobiotics, or just plain starvation. Anyway, you ever hear about not being able to go home again?
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Sorry, but you ought to read Sahlins again then - seeing as one of his major points was that hunter-gatherers are by and large NOT subject to starvation (it’s _peasant farmers-_ that starve on a regular basis because they are reliant on very few food sources). Also, antibiotics and vaccines don’t enter into it because the infectious diseases these things are used against can only exist in large populations, such as are supported by farming but not by hunting and gathering. For example, measles can’t maintain itself in populations of less than several thousand people. So you might break your leg hunting and gathering, but you’re not going to get measles, TB, smallpox, typhus, plague, flu, any of the STDs, or a host of others.
As for half your kids dying before age five, I would concede the point here provided you understand it isn’t due to famine. In the absence of other methods of contraception hunter-gatherers have to practice infanticide - their societies have to be highly mobile, and you can’t cart too many kids about with you when you’re on the move. Again, it’s the children of farmers who die from famine, not those of hunter-gatherers. Relatedly, birth control is important for hunter-gatherers, but not for farmers, who can just go ahead and have as many kids as possible
and then have a large fraction of them starve when famine beckons.
Old at thirty and dead at forty-five
again, you seem to be thinking about peasant farmers and not hunter-gatherers. Apparently hunter-gatherers had much better dental health than peasant farmers, for example. So if you're thinking of some wizened, toothless thirty-year-old, you've got some mental image of a peasant in your head, not a hunter-gatherer.
Unfortunately, you are probably right about not being able to go home. But I don’t think this was Ravi’s point anyway. These societies are important because they demonstrate the potential of human social arrangements. One of our greatest problems is that we cannot think beyond the crap we’ve been brought up to believe is necessary - work and markets are good examples that have recently cropped up on this list (though you would maintain both are necessary). A consideration of other societies gives some window onto what the imagination would otherwise not provide, hobbled as it is by the world we actually live in.
Eric