Sublime

A puzzling and counterintuitive finding, based on archeological and anthropological evidence, is that hunters and gatherers seem to have had better nutrition, fewer diseases, more varied diets, less strenuous labor, and longer lives than contemporaneous farm households.2 The evidence includes the larger stature of nomadic populations compared with

As Ehrenreich argues, collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal “biotechnology” for binding groups together.7 She agrees with McNeill that it is a form of muscular bonding. It fosters love, trust, and equality. It was common in ancient Greece (think of Dionysus and his cult) and in early Christianity (which she says was a “danced” relig

promiscuity tends to break down into polygyny as powerful men discover that they are in a position to demand exclusivity from multiple reproductive partners, either in sequence or in tandem.

Our unquenchable desire to be comfortable has debilitated us. Ironic, as there is nothing comfortable about being debilitated. This paradox—that advancements to make our lives less physically taxing have taxed us physically—is profound and has led to an emergent scientific hypothesis: Perhaps the only way out of our poor physical state, created by

The Corrective Lens

Arthur Newton, the father of Long Slow Distance training, persuaded the British

Almost everyone who isn’t a Pleistocene archaeologist – that is, who is not forced to confront the evidence – simply ignores it and carries on exactly as they had before, writing as if hunter-gatherers can be assumed to have lived in a state of primordial innocence. As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of th