I was browsing Quora when I chanced upon an answer concerning the spanking of children in hunter-gatherer societies. The answer itself was not by a historian, but they linked sources to actual historical research justifying the conclusions they drew.
I have an issue with the methodology used in the quoted texts in which they take several instances of child treatment from disparate but extant hunter gatherer societies in the world, and extrapolate from them a kind of universality applicable to all prehistory hunter gatherer tribes. It seems a leap to me to take a small sample size of a mode of social organization that is, for the most part extinct, and assume it maps on perfectly to not only antiquity, but general antiquity.
In short, the notion that "x,y and z hunter gatherer groups today do something implying that all or most hunter gatherer groups in antiquity did things the same way" seems problematic to me from a scientific standpoint. This doesn't apply only to child-rearing. I've seen this same justification being used on other kinds of behaviour that people attribute to hinter-gatherers. I can understand, say, postulating that hunter-gatherer tribes were by and large egalitarian since we can call on evidence shown by their deaths and entombment, but that's very different from looking at people alive today and assuming they live the same way those in the past did.
I have an issue with the methodology used in the quoted texts in which they take several instances of child treatment from disparate but extant hunter gatherer societies in the world, and extrapolate from them a kind of universality applicable to all prehistory hunter gatherer tribes. It seems a leap to me to take a small sample size of a mode of social organization that is, for the most part extinct, and assume it maps on perfectly to not only antiquity, but general antiquity.
What you're talking about is known as "ethnographic analogy", and it's more of a debate between archaeologists and anthropologists than historians. As a result, this old r/AskAnthropology thread might be helpful, and you might also think of posing this question over there.
By definition, historians study the written record of the past, while archaeologists attempt to understand past lifeways through the analysis of physical remains (artifacts, features, human remains, etc). Just like old documents don't arrange themselves into a coherent historical narrative, artifacts don't interpret themselves into a coherent story about past behavior. Archaeologists working in the present have to do that. Ethnographic analogy is one way of trying to get from material to behavior, but it's long been acknowledged that there are inherent issues unless you do so very, very carefully.
Just a quick note on that Quora article - the first book cited is by an evolutionary psychologist and, while the second is based on the author's experience of living with the Yequana tribe, the author herself had no training in anthropology (and the book is from 1975). They may not have been intimately familiar with the history of this debate. In fact, they both seem to lean into the implicit assumption that humans living in foraging or other sorts of nonindustrial economies can be thought of as a more pure or original form of our species. As your question points out, this is a faulty assumption. People living in small scale foraging societies have history and their culture has changed over time just as anyone else's has.
Anthropologists have been arguing over this issue for quite a long time. For example, Binford (one of the proponents of an increasingly scientific approach to archaeology) argued that analogy was being used incorrectly back in 1967.
"archaeologists have generally employed analogy to ethnographic data as a means of "interpreting" archaeologically observed phenomena, rather than as a means for provoking new types of investigation into the order observable in archaeological data. It is the latter role for analogy which is hopefully exemplified [in this article]"
Binford, L. R. (1967). Smudge Pits and Hide Smoking: The Use of Analogy in Archaeological Reasoning. American Antiquity, 32(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.2307/278774
To Binford and many of his contemporaries, questions or hypotheses could be informed by analogy, but answers had to ultimately come from an "objective" quantitative analysis of the material record.
extrapolate from them a kind of universality applicable to all prehistory hunter gatherer tribes
More recent trends in archaeological theory have shifted away from trying to find universal patterns. That doesn't mean we don't still use analogy - we do, it's useful - it just means that analogy today tends to be much more tightly focused, with explicit examination of both the ways in which past and present may be connected and ways in which change may have happened in between. See, for example:
"From its inception, archaeologists have been forced to rely on ethnographic analogies when attempting to make behavioral interpretations for past humans. In the study of the institution of slavery, archaeologists have drawn a vast majority of these analogies from modern cultures of West Africa - those cultures thought to have provided the largest number of enslaved peoples to North America. This paper will attempt to demonstrate that the Gullah and Geechee cultures of the Carolina Low country may very well represent a far more important source for such analogies.... the historic roots of the Gullah/Geechee are embedded within enslavement, Reconstruction, tenancy, sharecropping, and land holding, many of the same forces that helped to shape African American culture unlike the cultures of West Africa."
Brown, K. L. (2004). Ethnographic Analogy, Archaeology, and the African Diaspora: Perspectives from a Tenant Community. Historical Archaeology, 38(1), 79–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25617133
As an aside: this is the problem with Quora.
You may be interested in this recent answer of mine, along with the replies from /u/roca3 and /u/ideletedmyusername21 in the same thread, which expand on the points made by /u/the_gubna.