This is something kind of neat I see in my dissertation project- I’m a physical anthropologist and I’m studying the bones of these people who lived in a small village in Peru about a thousand years ago. Some of the people have skeletal characteristics that imply heavy labor- robust remodeling of the bones, large nuchal regions in the back of the cranium (it’s a point for muscle attachment), evidence of arthritis at the joints and in the spine- but what’s really neat about them is that they lived to a ripe old age and there’s no evidence of malnutrition. Many members of this population show signs of anemia and scurvy, but it’s not something I see in the ones who were most likely doing the hardest physical labor. While a few do show signs of broken bones and other injuries, these also seem like they were set and treated, as the healed fractures are well-aligned. Their arthritis isn’t nearly as bad as we see in even contemporary populations- it really seems like these folks valued their laborers and made sure they were taken care of. This was not an absurd concept a millennium ago, and it shouldn’t be an absurd concept today.