By our standards, people living in the past lived in conditions we would consider impoverished because society has changed and progressed since then because that is simply how time works.
But if you were to step into that time, of say, a subsistence economy, poverty wouldn’t mean the same thing as it does today. So relatively, no they didn’t live in what THEY would consider poverty.
However that is beside the point, my point here as i have mentioned in other replies, is not to say poverty is a new idea. It is to say that poverty is assumes to organically arise out of the human condition — which is untrue, as the systems of have and have nots have been designed by humans. The evolution of these systems, as outlined by Historical Materialism, show the shifting of capital amongst the classes.
I would argue the quality of life is not rising, In richer countries mental health and physical health is on a rapid decline, People aren’t paid a living wage, (in some places) most don’t have access to viable healthcare, homelessness is rampant. In America, the nutritional quality of food available to most people is awful & giving rise to dangerous illnesses (consider the insane rise of things like childhood diabetes, which didnt even EXIST in the 1980s . As well as how expensive it is to have access to nutritious food).
And that is only a taste. War, famine, environmental degradation, neoimperialism, cultural imperialism, economic imperialism and a whole other number of issues plague the so called Global South, whose resources were, and are still, taken to facilitate development in richer countries — whose riches were carried on the backs of laborers and natural resources from those countries in the first place.
Yes, we may have iPhones, but the harvesting & production of the materials needed to create said iPhones, the labor that is put into making the products themselves, and the millions of pounds of E-Waste that is destroying environments how that no, the average quality of life is not improving. and I’m not saying iPhones are the the only piece of tech/innovation that would distinguish class stratification, but what I am illustrating is that the comforts we enjoy come at an insane cost. We don’t even think about a lot of the ways that the system effects the lives of the general population. We may not live in caves and collect berries, but we do live in an age where oppression is implemented strategically to make most of us complicit.
Poverty is not something that operates like natural selection or is inherent in any human being. Poverty is a subsequent condition of a classist and now in modernity, capitalist, society.