Positive Health Online

THEN

Our Homo genus predecessors emerged some two million years ago (species variously labelled handy, busy, erect), and we ourselves about a quarter million.  Middle Africa, from which we spread, escaped the worst extremes of environmental change and population density was low. 

Most plausibly, our evolution as H. sapiens – the basics of body and mind - adapted to life in small groups, family based, that survived by foraging.  Change was slight and slow.  Simple basics of shelter, fire, tools and clothing  were established: empathy and  language developed, and mutual support among the close companions was key to survival.  We should not think of them as animal-like savages – the hunter-gatherers continuing even into the present repudiate that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arri_Raats,_Kalahari_Khomani_San_Bushman,_Boesmansrus_camp,_Northern_Cape,_South_Africa_(20540522615).jpg

Vue de Northern Cape en Afrique du Sud

Picture Credit: South African Tourism  on Wikipedia

Life was here and now, knowledge the lore and memory of a few generations together with the observation of nature (traditions celebrated by Stonehenge as a late embodiment).  Active day and inactive night patterned our daily physiology.  Male and female roles typically differed but were both vital.

Survival skills included noticing cues, learning by doing, and teamwork.  Foraging and domestic family tasks required sustained effort and occasional high energy episodes.  Food was not easily or always available so feasting occasional excess stored needed fat.

Agriculture began only some 10,000 years ago, large communities much later, and the industrial and digital ages are a mere blip in our timescale. 

This preamble is to remind of evolutionary circumstances from which we are far departed.

NOW

Let us view our allegedly sapient species objectively.  In a setting with little of nature, there we are: short-sighted, stooped and over-weight – a vast population, many crowded densely in cities.  

Participants of a walk against Diabetes and for general fitness around Nauru airport

Credit: Wikipedia

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficheiro:Participants_of_a_walk_against_Diabetes_and_for_general_fitness_around_Nauru_airport.jpg

Multiple changes accelerate and tradition fades.  Our lives are inconstant,  the future is hugely unpredictable and subject to effects from remote causes.  Our environment is built, its technology esoteric.

Perhaps travel on a train, anonymous in a crowd (recently masked) of strangers, some from distant places and unfamiliar cultures.  Or walk round a town centre and note the sheer oddity of people in body (posture and movement, shape and handicap), appearance (cosmetic and dress exaggerations, perhaps sexualising) and behaviour (preoccupied, eating, talking to remote others).  Count your own family’s sedentary hours, attention largely captured (we lack defence against conditioning) by on-screen engagement, much trivial, bizarre or extreme, some false.

Economic and political effects add stress.  Many basic resources are privatised (even to foreign ownership).  Practical jobs tend to be scorned, perhaps delegated to migrants, and self-sufficiency skills lost.  Computers, assumed infallible, and untiring machines never grumble or ask for pay rises.  Managements hide problems and  greed motivates: the long period of denying cancer due to tobacco is an example followed by industries denying climate change.  Weapons (financial, military, political, religious, digital ,,,) of vast power are available to triumph over others, and our self-extermination is possible.

Medicine continues to advance (but the deliberate erosion of our NHS must be noted).  Simple hygiene enabled a population explosion, and great milestones include vaccination, anaesthetics and antibiotics.  Treating the disorders of ageing (natural selection loses force after the age of reproduction and rearing, though experienced and supportive elders aid families) has lengthened lives even with severe handicap.  Many present health problems that disable victims and burden others arise not from natural causes but from our own doings.

Most obvious is what we choose to consume.  We found alcohol and nicotine to cheer us up.  Now we have a vast assortment of drugs for that purpose, all with side-effects - some include criminality and risky behaviour.   The least bother treatment is to match the discomfort to a relief, any side-effects ditto.    Tackling the cause, whether physical or lifestyle, of pain, disability, anxiety or depression may be evaded.   The plainest harms come with everyday food and drink often deficient in fibre and nutrients, while excess calories become fat and ready meals are highly processed and increase appetite.

New substances abound also in the environment.  Lead (toxic) and  CFCs (damaging the protective ozone layer) are now contained.  Air pollutants (dramatized by urban smogs) include nitrous oxide and microparticulates.  Water pollution includes sex hormones (perhaps affecting early brain development).  Many things we buy come with long lists of chemicals.

Autism is a fair example of a sudden and strange altered state, life-long and incurable.  Its rise (dismissal as mere recognition is implausible, though the label is sometimes misused) has no explanation.  Multiple correlations are available, but causation is uncertain (air pollution affecting pregnancy and babies seems possible).

SEEKING HEALTH

Awareness of our ancestral small groups explains, for example, why we should not be surprised that we are easily misled by impersonal communications (so many scams), or feel disturbed by the arrival of unfamiliar communities, or that mobs generate extreme behaviours.  It is easier to harm those discounted (such as heretics), merely inferior (women often, other races …), or simply remote unknown (from fraud to war that kills with an untroubled button push).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Social_distancing_queueing_for_the_supermarket_J._Sainsbury%27s_north_London_Coronavirus_Covid_19_pandemic_-_30_March_2020.jpg

Social distancing queueing for the supermarket J. Sainsbury's north London Coronavirus Covid 19 pandemic 30 March 2020

Credit: Philafrenzy on Wikipedia

Our society has huge and damaging  polarizations of wealth and power, and glamourises excess and ambitious self-importance, so tyrants emerge. The corrective evidence, moral and economic, is that ranking countries by happiness matches well with their levels of equality of wealth (also of education and  health, with democracy, religious tolerance and little corruption).

In general we need more and varied physically activity (but beware response unduly extreme or strange) with much reduction of screen time.   We are omnivores (though reducing animal foods now benefits the environment) accustomed to a simple diet, a mix that also supports our appropriate biome.  Adding value to the social life of family and friends spreads helpfulness.

Covid isolation dreadfully exposed the incompetence of parents, young children abandoned to verbal, social and practical inadequacy.  Schooling now favours a ‘tell them, test them’ accountability deficient in curiosity and creativity, interest and personal development.   The dispersal of families leaves many older people too solitary in an impersonal world and with a sense of helpless disempowerment as their accustomed resources are banished by technology.  Collectively, we lose practicality, common sense and thought: there is astonishing evidence of a  fall in measured intelligence IQ since the 1970s.  But much can be recovered.

Some of our global problems were not foreseeable as when Europeans took the disaster of unfamiliar diseases to South America and when we first burned coal massively and initiated the global warming and climate perils (scientific warnings for more than a century) that now require unprecedented cooperation.  But in a few recent generations we have added obvious health damage to inflict future illness: blunt warning information, effort to protect children, and help to change lifestyle are appropriate.

Mistakes and deceptions abound, and many believe according to wish rather than evidence.  The hope is that reason and compassion will prevail.  Wealth, power, and celebrity are not in themselves merits (and often link with great waste), and nor do ancestry, race or religious identity guarantee (though for all these categories statistics may identify what is most typical, the modal or median).  As individuals we can take care for ourselves and for others, usefulness a natural step toward personal happiness.  The simplicity of ‘less is more’ has appeal.  Everyday accomplishments and discoveries, interactions and kindnesses, can be of fine quality to be valued.

The  argument has been that understanding our collective hunter-gatherer ancestry is a rough guide to some likely problems and an easy first test of possible solutions.  If you have bothered to read this article, please think critically.  The rather loose writing is deliberate, in some ways a ‘green’ environmental approach applied to ourselves.  Perhaps consider how to make use of the argument.  Or perhaps decide the context is unduly alarmed or the basic premise mistaken: then muster thought toward an alternative account to guide well-being.