A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

Spend time with the body of your loved one after they die. Those who have lost loved ones to situations from which their bodies could not be recovered often suffer from prolonged periods of grief. When we view our dead, sit with them, and talk with them, we set a foundation upon which our grief, our neural recalibration, can be moored.

Omega Principle

Look out for Chesterton’s fence and invoke the Precautionary principle when messing with ancestral systems. Remember this: “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, are superior to genes in that they are more flexible and can adapt more rapidly.

Shop the edges of the supermarket.30 Better yet, buy your food with as few middlemen as possible, as at a farmers market. Nearly everything from the middle of the supermarket has more sugar, more salt, more umami—generally by means that are not vetted, at least not in the long term. Chewing on sugarcane is to eating refined sugar as chewing on coca

absent birth control, promiscuity is good for men, who procreate almost without cost, and dangerous to women, to whom the entire burden of child-rearing gets shifted.

Do let children play without adult supervision as early and often as possible. This includes in game and sport situations…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Consciousness we define—as we laid out in the very first chapter of the book—as that portion of cognition that is newly packaged for exchange,1 meaning that conscious thoughts are ones that could be delivered if someone asked what you were thinking about.

Monogamy also creates a system in which nearly everyone has a mate, as sex ratios tend to be one-to-one within populations, regardless of mating system. This prevents the accumulation of sexually frustrated males for whom violence may be the only path to reproduction, either through the overthrow of harem owners—as in lions and elephant seals—or th