Many people die before they can actually realize themselves as full human beings, children for example, and many people are so stunted by severe episodes of malnutrition that even if they reach chronological adulthood, they don't have the full capacity to realize thier innate human capabilities. That's a complicated problem in archeology because some might contend that it's unreasonable to ask whether people lived 75 years in the neolithic period since nobody did. But given their limited capacity to produce food and the reduced capacity of technology to act as a buffer between people and catastrophe or climatic change, people didn't live as well. Whether that's poverty or not I think is really a social judgement. They lived in integrated communities where a great deal more time is spent on elaborating culture through memory or allegory, and they had a much more intimate knowledge of the natural word surrounding them.
Many people think that is a much better way to live.
There was a certain moral center to the village that involved cultivating subsistence crops, maize and beans, and a ceremonial life throughout the entire year. The principles of governance emphasized settling disputes and working to increase the integration of the community. The formation of capital became extremely difficult when you had costly ceremonial consumption obligations. Here you had a real sharing of poverty but a sharing of poverty with a strong moral dimension. Everybody was very poor, living in a place where they were close to a city with rather modern hospitals, they were poor in a country that had a social security system that could protect people who were unable to work, uneducated in a country that had a national school system that functioned fairly well, etc.