Well as time goes on people are being wrapped up in more and more cotton wool. Kid's can't go out and play in case the get a hurty knee! You can't use a step ladder at work if you haven't been shown how to clime one! what is the world coming to. So yes the world is becoming full of wimps.

I used to point out to my father (a doctor -- MD), that medicine allowed the weak to survive long enough to procreate. And that that would weaken man's genome over the next 1,000 years. He didn't much care for that.

I can't find the reference right now but I reAd a recent article that the US uses about 80% of the opioids in the world

Pain has an evolutionary purpose. Ignoring it can lead to worse health issues, or even death. I was raised in an environment where people were stoic, or were expected to be. The result was people I love dying a lot younger than they would have if they'd sought medical help sooner, or at all.

Neanderthals didn't have a choice but to endure pain and more times than not, dead was the merciful med

One can argue that the affluent West is soft and unresilient and entitled I suppose. I don't think it's got anything to do with genetics so much as epigenetics and psychological factors and sometimes physical dysfunction. For example it's been shown that people with fibromyalgia have some kind of neurological dysregulation of pain perception and experience normal micro-tears and similar damage that's constantly happening and being repaired in our musculature and connective tissue, as pain that most of us don't even notice. And there is scientific evidence that a lot of chronic pain has to do with muscle disuse and the body trying to work around it.

Your kicked-in-the-ribs-by-a-bull example has probably has some combination of higher pain tolerance and conditioning that allows him to shrug off pain coupled with excellent physical shape. So does a military recruit who has undergone basic training successfully, or a trained athlete. If all the pain you've ever known is a stubbed toe then you're going to complain about it and notice it and suffer from it way more than if you've experienced the world of hurt that is basic training. It's a matter of perspective to an extent. Do you see every small pain as an obstacle or an opportunity to transcend and take action? Do you collapse around pain or push through it? That sort of thing.

I skateboarded as a kid.... So like guys that played football, I've seen people not even acknowledge injuries, some take a minute or two to walk off the pain, or just bawl their eyes out and lay there calling for mommy.
There are definitely different thresholds for pain, but I sort of think the people crying for mommy are conditioned to responses from growing up. Maybe my personal threshold is higher so I can't properly relate. Emotionally I think I have less range than most folks too. I see the same thing in my oldest as well. Younger son complains about discomfort much more and seems to be much more expressive emotionally. I wonder if there is a neural link, or is it learned? Was the oldest pressured to be the big brother, and the younger brother babied longer growing up?

I have a pretty high pain tolerance. But I’m terrified of needles.....even though they don’t hurt.

I have noticed my pain tolerance has lessened as I’ve gotten older though.

I don't know. My pain threshold is quite high.
It's there, always. I keep moving. There are no other options.
Sometimes, it forces me to rest, so I do.

Listening to other people complain about how much pain they're in,
grates on my nerves.
It's not because I don't believe them, or feel empathy for them, it's
because I can't stand whining and complaining. Either do something
about it, or shut the fuck up about it.
But that's just me.

Pain sucks but the more you feel your tolerance increases. Your #10 may be my 2. Never wanted to get use to it but it helps.

They know because multiple neaderthal skeletons have been discovered that show many of them toughed it out thru unset broken bones, etc. As they had a limited conceptualization of how to heal such things.

Complex pain issues are no joke and affect the entire body and mind of the person suffering thru them. People look to see how much they can bear instead of realizing that the ideal is to solve and to be pain free and running optimally.

Absolutely. The availability of current medicine/ pain killers. I don't know how easy it would have been for prehistoric peoples to get opium or whatever else they could have taken. If that even existed.

I spent a school day with a broken arm before I knew it was broken.
I crawled 2 miles home with a broken leg at night in winter in Colorado because it was my best option at the time.
Guess I need my DNA checked.

It's in your head how you control it.

I guess the Neanderthals didn't have much choice. Though I have no scientific evidence to support my belief, but I have serious doubts that 24 hour drug stores lined their tracks. Even nowadays we cannot really know what the pain perceptions on a individual level are. I express with some certainly that the vast majority of humans and other animals avoid pain unless that have masochisitic propensities.
It is largely the knowledge that painrelief is available that dictates our choices.
I remember dislocating my lower arm in a fall. I almost fainted and tried, without success, to pull it I order to realign it. On my way to the hospital I just concentrated on the positive: Lucky it wasn't my leg. Crawling to a hospital would have been so much slower and inconvenient.
While walking about 2 km, just over a mile in your measurements, I thought about pain a lot and other instance of my own and when I had seen people suffering pain.
Civilization has many remedies and we take advantage of them.
BTW Christopher Hitchens was very critical of Mother Theresa because she refused to administer painrelief to pregnant women during delivery. Her agreement was that sufferieng was a divine gift.

Believe me this is true ! My grand daddy was a Neanderthal and he was as tough as nails. you should hear the stories he used to tell me, unbelieveable !!!

People still cope with extreme pain like broken bones, no? At least until they get to a hospital, but I still know plenty of old timers like my dad or former addicts that will refuse pain meds no matter what they broke. I’m not sure what the point of the article might have been. Obviously the comforts of modern civilization have made a lot of us softer than others, but I doubt it’s had time to de-evolve our potential on average. You’d be surprised what you can deal with if your life depends on it. Just most of us are lucky enough not to have to find out anymore. If you’re not so bougie upper middle class that you’ve never mowed your own yard, I’d say your pain tolerance is probably fine.