Hunter-gatherer

So when you promote anti-fragility in a lifestyle, the ultimate anti-fragile lifestyle is similar to what we observed when those Peruvian Amazonians got witnessed in that uncontacted tribe.

Like, Hunter-gatherer culture is fundamentally anti-fragile because you don't know when your next meal is coming from.

There's intermittency of nutrient supply.

There's intermittency in many regards of exercise patterns, but it's also quite...

It's not just about discovering that seeds grow into plants.

Hunter-gatherers knew that.

They'd known it for thousands of years.

The shift to agriculture wasn't about knowledge.

Early farmers were working sixty, seventy, maybe eighty hours per week preparing fields, planting, weeding, protecting crops from animals and birds, harvesting, processing, storing.

Agriculture is back-breaking labor, repetitive and exhausting, and the diet got worse.

Hunter-gatherers eat an incredibly diverse diet, hundreds of different plant and animal species depending on season and availability.

Early farmers ate maybe a dozen crops, sometimes just two or three staple grains, plus whatever they could supplement through hunting and gathering.

Comparative research has also revealed the profound ways in which Aboriginal human societies have modified each Mediterranean ecosystem through the technology of fire.

Hunter-gatherer societies were once seen as having almost no control over their environments or local nature.

We now appreciate that groups like the native Australians and the native Californians were in fact fire farmers capable of creating, you know, enormous and long-lasting changes in their landscapes.

In fact, in both Australia and Southern California, it's almost impossible to know what elements or components of the original landscape at contact was not created or in some way structured by human beings and particularly by fire.

We evolved to know how to get our food.

We never evolved to choose our food.

Hunter-gatherers have to know a lot in order to hunt animals and find their plants and process them.

Farmers have to know a lot to grow their food.

You walk into a supermarket with 40,000 different foods, how are you supposed to decide what to choose? We were never evolved to cope with that kind of diversity and abundance.

And what we think is that this was useful when all of our ancestors were living as hunter-gatherers, and so they just had to go f- hunt and find their food.

Hunter-gatherer kids also searched for food, mostly on their own.

So you're saying they had no adult following them in the forest saying, "Eat this broccoli."

[laughs]

... similar to Stonehenge, but ma- much more of them, like not a single circle or st- megalithic structures, plenty of them, and they have some carvings on them even, and plenty of other place, things around them, and these are dated to at least 9600 BC, so 12,000 years ago.

And who built them? Hunter-gatherers, this is the prevalent theory, but maybe it was some kind of advanced society.

So I think even mainstream is pushing the dates back.

If we find in, let's say, next few years some kind of evidence at Gunung Padang in Indonesia, it may also be another milestone.

Did we lose something important when our brains shrank? Or did we simply shed unnecessary weight? The pessimists point to the correlation with agricultural decline in cognitive diversity.

Hunter-gatherers need to maintain extensive environmental knowledge, complex mental maps of vast territories, detailed understanding of hundreds of plant and animal species, Early farmers could survive knowing far less.

They cultivated a few crop species, tended a few domestic animals, lived in one location their entire lives.

The cognitive demands were different, arguably reduced in certain domains.

Ketone metabolism produces different signaling molecules than glucose metabolism.

some of these molecules like brain derived neurotrophic factor directly stimulate neural growth and maintenance constant high glucose availability from agricultural diets might have reduced the metabolic flexibility that supported large brains then there's the lifestyle piece agriculture didn't just change what we ate it changed how we lived and those changes brought new evolutionary pressures that might have favoured smaller brains settlement meant population density for the first time humans were living in large groups hundreds or thousands of people in relatively small areas that population density created perfect conditions for infectious disease measles smallpox tuberculosis all the epidemic diseases that would eventually kill millions they emerged from agricultural settlements where humans lived in close contact with each other and with domesticated animals disease became a major evolutionary pressure surviving epidemics required robust immune systems and immune systems are expensive to maintain they consume resources energy and metabolic capacity in an environment where food quality had already declined bodies faced a choice invest limited resources in maintaining a massive energy hungry brain or invest them in immune function that might save your life during the next epidemic evolution chose survival immune systems got more sophisticated brains got smaller it's a brutal trade-off but it makes perfect sense from a natural selection perspective a slightly smaller brain is better than a corpse The reduction in physical activity probably played a role too.

Hunter-gatherers walked, ran, climbed, and engaged in constant physical activity.

That activity wasn't just exercise.

The earliest types of social formations are all kin-based.

Hunter-gatherer societies have basically very small groups of relatives, bands of 40, 50 people.

The first states are created that have a hierarchical and centralized form of authority.

But again, they are what Max Weber called patrimonial because they all arise out of the The household of the ruler and the state bureaucracy is just the cousins, sons-in-laws, you know, so forth of the ruler.