We know that our bodies have been designed by natural to stay strong & healthy in the environment at the time Homo Sapiens emerged as a new specie. So if our goal is to be strong and healthy, we first need to understand the environment that shaped our biology.
So, what type of environment shaped the human body? An unpredictable and hostile one. It was generally full of threats from predators, other humans, or simply the wild elements. Efforts and persistence were required to collect the daily calorific ration for all members of the tribe. Food sources were different from the ones we have these days. As a general rule, they provided less easily accessed carbohydrates than we have at our disposal.
Grains were not cultivated yet, and wild fruits, for example, contained much less sugar than the fruits of today and much more fiber, making them harder to chew and slower to digest. The same goes for the tubers that were good starch sources.
Key Aspects of Our Ancestral Environment
With a focus on health & fitness, the most important aspects of that environment are:
- Energy scarcity
- Unpredictability
- Lack of comforts
Energy Scarcity
Calories were scarce and competition for them was fierce. Humans (and most animals for that matter) were often hungry, and getting their calorific ration was the main goal of the day, not always fulfilled. The search for calories dominated their thoughts.
Unpredictability
This scarcity was exacerbated by the unpredictability of their lifestyle. Early humans were at the mercy of the changing elements, random encounters with prey or predators, and alternating periods of feast and famine. Hunting and gathering is all well and good, but we invented agriculture for a reason: to decrease the unpredictability of our food supply.
The successful outcome of a hunt is not guaranteed, and gathering was done in a nomadic way: you could well hit a few empty patches before being lucky again after a few days. Our bodies evolved to be resilient and cope well with this high variability in our food supply.
Lack of Comforts
Finally, there is little debate that energy scarcity and unpredictability prevented life from being comfortable. You had to endure heat sometimes, cold other times, get wet if you needed food under the rain, endure insect bites without a sound when stalking prey, and always have people on guard to watch for threats.
What lifestyle did the emerging humans practiced to survive?
Our ancestors adapted to this environment by adopting a lifestyle allowing them to exploit it as best as possible. They lived in small nomadic tribes of a few families, comprising on average between 50 and 100 individuals. They practiced a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and thrived in many habitats, from the savanna to coastal areas, with everything in-between. Diets were all natural, of course, but were varied as populations relied on different environments for their needs–humans can thrive on many diets.
Daily Activities of Our Ancestors
If we look at their daily activities, the picture becomes a more common one. Regardless of their habitat, our hunter-gatherer ancestors moved a lot, though not by choice and certainly not with the goal of “working out”. Their daily subsistence and survival required them to complete many activities, most of them physical, so they did it.
The most frequent ones were:
- Hunting
- Gathering, including digging for underground tubers
- Tools manufacturing
- Building/maintaining shelter
- Cooking and other food manipulation
- Moving between camps and moving the camps
- Defending against predators/enemies and fleeing
- Parenting
These are the activities our bodies needed to be proficient at. If you weren’t able to do your share of these, you were a liability. Each of them covers a variety of movement patterns that we’ll describe later. For now, let’s just note that having to do these tasks daily meant that the volume and variety of physical activity for our ancestors were both very high purely by necessity.
Fortunately for them, the human body adapted through natural selection to perform these tasks very well. So well adapted, in fact, that it enabled them to thrive in such a lifestyle and ultimately allowed Homo Sapiens to drive to extinction all other Homo species.
The Human Body: designed to survive and perform under the pressure of this environment and lifestyle
Our bodies needed to allow us to perform daily all the physical tasks listed above and to do so while coping with an unpredictable supply of calories. Beyond the anatomical characteristics enabling us to move and manipulate as required (opposable thumbs, pelvis enabling bipedalism, etc.), our bodies adapted to:
- Get their hands on as much energy as possible
- Spend as little energy as possible
- Store as much as possible to survive lean times
We like to think of ourselves as rational and sophisticated decision-makers, and the gift of consciousness does indeed set us apart in the animal kingdom, but we’re still firmly part of it. This means we are also ruled by our instincts and biological urgings. We’re not ruled by them as much as other animals are, as consciousness enables us to better resist our bodily urges, to a point.
Pleasurable sensations tend to make us act in ways that get us ever more pleasure, and our instincts make us avoid efforts, discomfort, and pain as much as possible. You could say our biological instincts direct our brains with various sticks and carrots like a puppeteer, while we remain under the illusion that we control our actions, and you wouldn’t be too wrong.
Our natural instincts push us in very specific ways
What do these instincts make us do?
Maximizing Energy Intake
First, get as much energy as possible. We crave carbs and fat because we needed to be driven, every day, to go out and brave all kinds of threats to get calories. Carbs and fats give us more energy per gram than proteins. We also crave, the most, the carbs that give us the fastest boost of energy: sugars. Foods with high sugar content were very rare but very desirable for the energy they provided.
Adapting to Variable Food Supply
Second, our bodies adapted to the high variability in our calorific supply by making us able to regularly go for a few days without food. They do that by driving us to gorge as much as possible on calories when we find them and storing the excess energy as fat for leaner times in the future. We are very efficient at retaining as much energy as possible by synthesizing and storing fat, and that isn’t by chance. The inheritable traits making the human body less able to store excess calories as fat were probably driven out of the gene pool quickly. Again, we could see the human body as a very efficient eating-and-storing-energy-as-fat machine and it wouldn’t be far from the truth.
Minimizing Energy Expenditure
Lastly, maximizing energy in is good but minimizing energy out is as important. So our natural instincts are powerful at making us dislike any unnecessary efforts, physical or mental. Efforts cost energy, energy is rare, minimize efforts. Straightforward.
There are countless other instincts at play that are designed to maximize our survival and reproductive rate in the hostile environment of early humans. The pleasure we get from sexual activity to push us to mate, the pleasure we feel from the company of others to make us seek the improved survival rate that comes from living in a small tribe, the drive to reduce discomfort in a world awash with them, etc. Note the ever-present energy aspect: if you’re too cold or too hot, it costs your body more energy to maintain a stable internal temperature. Comfort is a proxy for energy expenditure.
Our Physical Adaptations
The anatomy and biomechanics of our body are also optimized to thrive in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. We are not specialized in any physical activity but are excellent movement generalists. We can run for very long distances and be very fast over shorter distances. Our hands allow us to create every kind of tool we can dream of. Our strong upper body isn’t as efficient as the other great apes’ but still allows us to climb trees and rocks quickly enough to escape predators.
Combine everything with our uniquely large brain giving us the advantages of creativity and collaboration, and Homo Sapiens was able to compete very successfully. The human body was extraordinarily well adapted to that environment and our lifestyle.
The Crucial Corollary: Our Bodies Need Ancestral Stimuli
So far, so good, and maybe nothing surprising for some readers. What’s often blissfully ignored, though, is the following corollary: the human body needs the physical stimuli applied to it through that lifestyle to stay healthy– or at least some. Without them, it tends to break down over time, figuratively but also quite literally.
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