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Why not? Why can't that person know that if he hasn't read and been taught and learned that primitive tribes have lower lifespans and higher mortality rates than a more civilized culture?
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Who taught you that ? Are you comparing the health and lifespan of 'primitive' tribes with your average New Yorker, or with a more appropriate group, like the poor farming communities that subsist across much of the world (so called 'third world')?
If you are suggesting that they have a lower lifespan than we do then you may have a point, but what is on offer is not our lifestyle, but a few little forays into modernity. If you are suggesting that the poorest 'modern' community is healthier and longer lived than 'primitive' hunter gatherers then you are wrong.
Compare the health and lifespan of settled subsistence farmers with primitive hunter gatherers and you will almost certainly find that the hunter gatherers are healthier, live longer, are more resistant to disease, work less and have a healthier and more nutritious diet.
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Though contemporary gatherer-hunters eat more meat than their prehistoric forbears, vegetable foods still constitute the main stay of their diet in tropical and subtropical region (Lee 1968a, Yellen and Lee 1976). Both the Kalahari San and the Hazda of East Africa, where game is more abundant than in the Kalahari, rely on gathering for eighty percent of their sustenance (Tanaka 1980). The !Kung branch of the San search for more than a hundred different kinds of plants (Thomas 1968) and exhibit no nutritional deficiency (Truswell and Hansen 1976). This is similar to the healthful, varied diet of Australian foragers (Fisher 1982, Flood 1983). The overall diet of gatherers is better than that of cultivators, starvation is very rare, and their health status generally superior, with much less chronic disease (Lee and Devore 1968a, Ackerman 1990).
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From
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/futureprim.html