[chuckm]

Why would you think so? Don't want to get into a long discussion, but just look at the differences. On the one hand you've open space, natural surroundings, varied food available for the hunting & gathering, which takes a few hours a day, the chance to do different things every day. On the other hand, your typical urban dweller of those days crammed a family into a single room, and survived on a sparse diet of mostly grains. Even into Shakespeare's time and later, streets were often open sewers, the air was full of smoke & stink, disease abounded. The great majority of people worked long hours for little return beyond survival. Humm... seems like some things haven't changed all that much

In urban settings, we do have different worries, to be sure. But why would cultural evolution favor urbanism over nomadism? If nomadism provides better life and health, why didn't that lifestyle come to dominate modern human populations? Simply this, nomads were too busy with their "few hours a day" hunting and gathering and surviving in general to develop things like writing and science. (Just curious, have you ever tried to live off the land, lacking any tool you could not make from wood or stone? I haven't, but rumor has it that it is tough. Starvation is one of many occupational hazards. I wouldn't spend too much time romanticizing this life.)

From an earlier post:

You might consider the megafauna that ranged North America during the last Ice Age: everything from wooly mammoths to the sabertooths & dire wolves that preyed on them. Fast-forward to immediate pre-Columbian times, and only a few moderately large herbivores remained - buffalo, moose, & elk.

Much of the rise and fall of the warm-blooded megafauna has to do with thermal regulation. In a cold climate, heat retention is a big deal and large animals do better than small animals there. For small animals, the caloric requirement per pound of body mass needed only to maintain body temperature becomes a problem. In very warm climates, heat dissipation becomes the dominant issue, favoring smaller animals. A large animal (apart from special adaptations - the ears of the African elephant being one) exerting itself can quickly die from overheat. A wooly mammoth in a warm environment would be forced to either move slowly (making it easy, high calorie prey!) or risk dying of overheating (which early humans probably prodded the animals into doing - again easy prey).