Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene, and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dismi…
"In my opinion, people give a little bit too much credit to living like our ancestors. A quick review of the historical facts show that we now live longer than we ever have [1]. I'm not saying this means everything we do today is better for us than what our ancestors did, but bathing is a matter of hygiene, and personal hygiene came along with the wonderful improvement we like to call indoor plumbing. I wouldn't dism…
Notice I didn't say anything about diet. What I mentioned was hygiene. I also agree that comparing paleo man to current day man is about as useful as comparing the failure-modes a Model A Ford to a Toyota Prius. They operate in entirely different environments.
The analysis of life-expectancy and quality-of-life gets far more interesting when you move in to a period of more recent history, when humans stopped dying of things like tripping over their rock pile and started congregating in groups, dying of something they contracted from the pile of poo they left in the gutter. All of the sudden we start seeing disease and infection becoming a major player in bringing us to our end. In this case, something as simple as soap can help extend our lives by drastically increasing the effectiveness of bathing.
This is where we get in to some more "advanced" common sense. I don't think the goal ought to be eradicating bacteria from our bodies. If you set out to kill all the bacteria on your body, you will fail. It is simply impossible to kill all the bacteria without killing your own cells. This means that any remaining bacteria must have avoided an early demise either through resistance to your agent of bacteria-death, or adapted some way to hide. In either case, the bacteria is better equipped to survive the next round of cleansing, and will happily go forth and replicate. The end result is a whole heard of stronger bacteria. See also, MRSA.
Backing up, my point is that I'm right there with you. As silly as it is to try to drag our entire paleo life in to the 21st century, I think it's foolish to accept at face value the messages we're bombarded with by product marketing on a daily basis. They want us scared of bacteria on our bodies so we'll buy their new Super-ultra-cleansing-action-anti-bacterial soap instead of their competitors Just-ultra-anti-bacterial soap. Accept that for what it is, but don't write off soap altogether.
It's a game, and the winning strategy is to keep your head and as you said, "get the best of both worlds."