Why Humans Evolved to be Active

Humans of all to be much more physically active than our ape ancestors. Typical chimpanzee walks maybe two to three kilometers a day, and they take maybe what, three, 4,000 steps a day. A typical hunter-gatherer takes about 15 to 20,000 steps a day. Per kilo hunter-gatherers spend about twice as much energy per kilo on being physically active per day than our ape cousins. And importantly, that physical activity occurs as we age, right? So Americans are pretty inactive, as we all know. A typ...

 Children are Smarter Than Adults

This precocity of childhood may be said to characterise all the known races of man, and to be even more marked the more primitive the race. On this point, ‘It is an interesting fact,’ says Havelock Ellis (183, p. 177), ‘and perhaps of some significance, that among primitive races in all parts of the world, the children, at an early age, are very precocious in intelligence.’ And again, ‘ It seems that, the lower the race, the more marked is this precocity, and its arrest at puberty. ...

 Young Apes Resemble Human Children

Hartmann, in his work on the Anthropoid Apes (289, p. 301), quotes, approvingly, the words of Vogt: ‘When we consider the principles of the modern theory of evolution, as it is applied to the history of development, we are met by the important fact that in every respect the young ape stands nearer to the human child than the adult ape does to the adult man. The original differences between the young creatures of both types are much slighter than in their adult condition : this assertion, ma...

 Prolongation of Human Infancy

Prolongation of Human Infancy.—-Nevertheless, as Professor Butler has recently pointed out, the doctrine of the prolongation of human infancy, which Professor John Fiske has so ably shown to be part of the theory of evolution, was anticipated by Anaximander of Miletus, who flourished about 565 b.c. Professor Butler’s discovery, however, was itself anticipated by Burnet in his Early Greek Philosophy (95, p. 74) by a couple of years. Burnet, after quoting the Theophrastean account of the sp...

 The Power of Fire

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 The Disruptive Nature of Homo sapien's Rapid Rise to Apex...

Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top ...

 Speciation of the Human Race

On a time-scale of a thousand years, neither politics nor technology is predictable. China and Japan are the only major political units that have lasted that long. A thousand years ago, Europe was an unimportant peninsula lying on the edge of the more advanced and civilized Arab world. The technologies of today would be unintelligible to our ancestors of a millennium ago. The only human institutions that retain their identities over a thousand years are languages, cultures, and religions. Per...

 Humans are Like Deer in the Anthropocene

I asked Rooney about the remarkable ability of deer to thrive in their home range—most of the U.S.—while producing ecosystem simplification and a biodiversity crash. In his own studies of deer habitats in Wisconsin, Rooney found that only a few types of grass thrive under a deer-dominant regime. The rest, amounting to around 80 percent of native Wisconsin plant species, had been eradicated. “The 80 percent represent the disappearance of 300 million years of evolutionary history,” he s...