Image: Heads of State
In Brief
- Many of the challenges we humans face today are the result of a mismatch between the environment our ancestors adapted to over millions of years and the world we now live in.
- But this incongruity is itself the result of a uniquely human characteristic: our impulse to extend ourselves beyond the limits evolution set for us.
- Science is one of the tools humans use to achieve this goal of stretching our physical and mental capabilities.
Sit down with an anthropologist to talk about the nature of humans, and you are likely to hear this chestnut: “Well, you have to remember that 99 percent of human history was spent on the open savanna in small hunter-gatherer bands.” It's a classic cliché of science, and it's true. Indeed, those millions of ancestral years produced many of our hallmark traits—upright walking and big brains, for instance. Of course, those wildly useful evolutionary innovations came at a price: achy backs from our bipedal stance; existential despair from our large, self-contemplative cerebral cortex. As is so often the case with evolution, there is no free lunch.
Compounding the challenges of those trade-offs, the world we have invented—and quite recently in the grand scheme of things—is dramatically different from the one to which our bodies and minds are adapted. Have your dinner come to you (thanks to the pizza delivery guy) instead of chasing it down on foot; log in to Facebook to interact with your nearest and dearest instead of spending the better part of every day with them for your whole life. But this is where the utility of the anthropologist's cliché for explaining the human condition ends.
This article was originally published with the title Super Humanity.
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1 Comments
Add CommentRobert Sapolsky writes “our predecessors lost their thick body hair to keep cool” This tells me something about Robert – limited experience in hot climates. The purpose of a sheep’s thick fleece is not to keep it warm, but to keep it cool. Sheep adapted to deserts with extremes of temperature have thick woolly fleeces to keep the sun’s radiant heat from reaching the skin. Sheep adapted to far northern climes have sparse hairy fleeces to let what little eat from the sun there is reach the skin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople are the same. Inhabitants of hot dry climates like the middle east tend to wear long flowing robes to keep the heat from the sun out.
It is the same here in oz. Tourists to the outback arrive in shorts and tee-shirts. Locals accustomed to the harsh climate wear denim jeans, long-sleeved shirts and hats with broad brims.
I suspect our lack of body hair is more a consequence of our neotenous evolution. Our hairlessness resembles that of baby apes.