Human Evolution and Health
Why Evolution and Health are Seamlessly Intertwined – And How They Can Inspire Your Health Journey
Wonder why you eat too much? Or why you don’t move enough? Don’t blame yourself, you aren’t doing anything wrong. The answers to these modern-day health questions lie in the story of how our bodies were formed by evolution and the conditions that challenged us to survive as a species over many millennia.
Taking our evolutionary status into account amid the recent and very rapid change into modern life has given me an expanded, and very forgiving, attitude toward myself in my pursuit of present-day health. Evolution and health are seamlessly intertwined. My body was made for “back then” even though I am alive now, in the civilized and industrialized twenty-first century. Yet, here’s what I’ve discovered: the more I mimic my evolutionary heritage the healthier I become.
Our Time-Skewed Evolutionary Bodies
In his insightful book, The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson depicts modern humans as having “stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” Bring these three factors together and you have our modern era on earth. Our current human experience exists simultaneously in all these realms, often at odds with each other.
In daily life, it can be quite a challenge to navigate from one realm to the next. When it comes to modern-day health, evolution has added yet another category to Wilson’s list: our prehistoric bodies. In my opinion, too many of us are relying on the “godlike technology” of man-made prescription drugs, surgery, and cutting-edge, high-tech machines to fix our health. Getting in touch with our ancestral past has become my first choice toward better health.
Evolution and Health in Context
Our modern lifestyle, bodies, and minds – even if you go back to the dawn of language up to 200,000 years ago – represent a mere fraction of the lengthy timespan of 2-4 million years that we have been walking upright and becoming human. It took untold millennia to get us to evolve into who we now find ourselves as a species.
Yet our bodies are still working the same way they did many thousands of years ago. We were built as rugged survival machines, able to move all day, in different ways and at different speeds, to find enough food to eat, to protect ourselves, and to survive. This activity involved a great expenditure of energy. Procuring nutrition, whether by foraging, hunting, or farming, took up most of our time.
Our bodies “grew up” in a world of hunger and scarcity. Food wasn’t always plentiful, so nature evolved our metabolism to be highly efficient, to either use or store every calorie of precious food. Imagine a group of early humans hunkering down in a cold cave through long winter months – and how many calories they would need to endure these extreme conditions. Our fat storage system evolved to conserve energy in these trying conditions. It enabled us to have enough power to survive, continue to evolve, and thrive as a species.
Cut to modern life. Food is plentiful, especially low-quality, high-calorie food, and we no longer need to move very much to get it. Instead of foraging and hunting, we cruise the supermarket aisles. Yet my body is still storing the excess calories as fat like it did a million years ago. This sedentary way of life, for way too many people, leads to metabolic disorders that can escalate toward diabetes and a host of other serious conditions like heart and artery disease, cancer, and dementia. While these conditions probably existed in the distant past, they were not nearly as prevalent as they are today. For example, diabetes is so prevalent today it is considered an epidemic.
Modern medicine can sometimes control the symptoms that are generated by this kind of lifestyle. But there is only one escape from the cause of them. In broad strokes that means eat less, move more.
Being aware of the relationship between human evolution and health can help us in our quest to find ways to keep healthy. We were all born into bodies and biology in which the blueprint was in place and being shaped for millions of years before we existed. In fact, scientists have discovered that our brains evolved from the biology of our bodies, not the other way around. Nothing we have achieved in modern life has changed that biology, even though we now have tools to better measure and alter our biological selves with pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, and other “god-like technology.”
Most of all, my appreciation of the evolution of my biological body has given me my own blueprint for how to maintain my body in health for as long as possible. Nature has been healing and making us stronger for much longer than modern medicine. When it comes to preventive health nature is my most powerful ally.
So, the next time you eat with awareness or move in a conscious effort to improve your health, step back a minute and recall the connection between evolution and health. Remember where your body comes from, the conditions under which it evolved, and what it needs to flourish.
Nourish your body with what made us the way we are: natural food and lots of movement. Reconnecting with these primal sources of energy and health is a way to appreciate the power of your own mind and body as well as our shared anthropological heritage.
