Human Evolution Matters When it Comes to Healthy Living

Almost everyone has a different opinion regarding what's most necessary for maintaining good health. While a dietician may tell you the key is a balanced diet catered to your lifestyle, a pharmacy tech may convinced that augmenting our bodies with medicine is the best strategy for maximizing our health. But the bottom line is that understanding health takes no more effort than understanding the evolution of the human body. It is through living out our nature to the best of our abilities that we can hope to live up to the ideals of healthy human life.

Anatomically modern humans first showed up on the plains of Africa around 200,000 years ago. For thousands of years prior, lower forms of homo sapiens evolved as creatures of wandering habits – hunters and gatherers – and for thousands of years afterward modern humans would continue to employ such survival strategies. It was not until roughly 10,000 years ago that humans finally shifted from hunter/gatherers to a predominantly agricultural species. Moving on into the modern day, it has only been within the last century that people have migrated into the desk chair.

Upon doing the math it's easy to see that for the majority of their time on this planet, humans had been spending their days walking and running. While their lack of technological progress made their attempts to master their environment crude and thus their lives short, we owe our design as upright walking, long-legged, long-distance runners to the survival strategies these ancestors exercised.

Evolution is a slow process that for the most part is a process millions of years in the making. While human lifestyle has changed drastically in 10,000 years, the human anatomy has not. Your genes still think you are being born into a prehistoric world. Thus it is essential that you in some fashion try and recreate a prehistoric life.

While that may make you conjure up the visual of trying to take down a wooly mammoth with a spear, it simply means using your body for what it was made to do: walking, running, and just about anything else that gets you to move your legs. Sitting at a desk for eight hours a day has been proven to be absolutely destructive to the human body. When you consider how little sitting we've been doing for most of our time on Earth, such conclusions make a ton of sense.

The secret to a healthy life is the design of your being you see every day of your life. There's potential to hunt down a saber-toothed tiger buried under that unhealthy body. Access that potential through diet and exercise, and you'll be living up to the expectations human evolution has set for you.