A group of Australian aborigines was recently invited to visit the prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France.  Surrounded by ancient paintings of horses, reindeer, bison, and bulls stretching several meters across the rock, one of them turned to their guide and said, "We are at home."[1]

What could he have meant?  Not one of those animals are native to the land his ancestors have called home for some 40,000 years.  Perhaps he felt something that researchers are now confirming:  life for the ancient artists of Lascaux was remarkably similar to the lives of this man's parents and grandparents.

For those of us not raised in a hunter-gatherer society however, the minds of those ancient artists (who lived approximately 20,000 years ago) seem very distant indeed.  Their relationship with the natural world, and with the animals who shared it with them, is practically incomprehensible to modern humans.  It is largely this lack of comprehension, in fact, that generates the mysteries of Lascaux, Stonehenge, Easter Island, and other prehistoric sites. Despite all that we can never know of these people, we are linked to them by our bodies.

Our genetic makeup has changed very little in the 100,000-year history of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, much less in the in the past 40,000 years or so, when modern humans first appear in the fossil record of Europe.  So, while we may have little sense of what those ancient artists were thinking, we can make some very educated guesses about what they ate and drank, how much they exercised, and their overall quality of life.  And it turns out that they have a lot to teach us.

Depending upon what one means by the word human, from 95 to 99% of human evolution has occurred in the context of hunter-gatherer societies.[2] So it is not surprising that we are designed for the sort of life common to these societies and not at all for that which most of us are living today, which differs from the hunter-gatherer in many important ways.  But before we can begin to take a close look at some of the differences, letπs first reassess what we know about the Paleolithic (stone age) lifestyle.

Most of us have a decidedly negative impression of stone age life.  We imagine it as a time of great fear, discomfort, and a ceaseless quest for food.  We imagine our distant ancestors as small, hairy people fleeing saber-toothed tigers or huddled around fires in cold, damp caves.  We have been taught that the advent of agriculture brought about the changes that allowed people to settle into villages and begin the process of growing surplus food, creating  leisure time in which to think and experiment, leading to further invention (of writing, of mythology, of art, of technology), which has ultimately resulted in the ≥superior≤ lifestyle we enjoy today.  According to this view, human existence has been a steady climb upward from the tortured and insecure lives somehow endured and survived by those artists in Lascaux. 

But contemporary researchers have some serious doubts about this self-serving depiction of human social evolution.  According to Marvin Harris, a leading anthropologist, ≥much of what we think of as contemporary progress is actually a regaining of standards that were widely enjoyed during prehistoric times.≤  Harris believes that, ≥stone age populations lived healthier lives than did most of the people who came immediately after them.≤  In fact, ≥stone age hunters worked fewer hours for their sustenance than do typical Chinese and Egyptian peasants ≠ or, despite their unions, modern-day factory workers.≤ [3]  And recent excavations have shown that paleolithic Europeans were an average of six inches taller than their descendents who lived in agricultural societies.  We are only now approaching the average height of our stone age ancestors.

Our vision of so-called ≥primitive≤ life is largely inherited from the Victorians, who were infatuated with technology and the promise of an ever-improving future.  Now that we have become painfully aware of the costs of this technology, of the emptiness of the promises of ≥time-saving≤ devices, of a world thrown increasingly off-balance by industrial wastes, and of the ever-increasing scourge of hunger despite rapid increases in agricultural productivity, perhaps it is time to look again at our distant past.  Perhaps, with this painful awareness of the limits of our own modern approach to life, we are finally ready to reassess our past without the bias of Victorian self-congratulation.

None of this is to say that we do not enjoy some significant advantages over our distant ancestors.  They died (on average) much earlier than we do because of infectious diseases we have learned to control.  But there is no denying that we often die younger than necessary from so-called ≥diseases of civilization≤ the stone age diet and life-style prevented.  In fact, researchers writing in ≥The American Journal of Medicine≤ in 1988, make the case that ≥pathophysiologic and epidemiologic research conducted over the past 25 years supports the concept that certain discrepancies between our current lifestyle and that typical of preagricultural humans are important risk factors for the chronic degenerative diseases that account for most mortality in todayπs Western nations.≤[4]  They go on to point out that, ≥The Late Paleolithic era, from 35,000 to 20,000 B.P., may be considered the last time period during which the collective human gene pool interacted with the bioenvironmental circumstances typical of those for which it had been originally selected.  It is because of this that the diet, exercise patterns, and social adaptations of that time have continuing relevance for us today.≤[5]

So these are the  principal factors we need to consider when comparing the health of our stone age ancestors to our own: diet, exercise and ≥social adaptations,≤ many of which cause stress.  Indeed, the vast majority of our health-related complaints can be traced to one or all of these factors.  As Marie Antoinette's dressmaker is reported to have said, ≥There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.≤  In advising us to make certain changes in our diet, to increase our level of physical activity, and to reduce the stress in our daily lives, contemporary medical experts are essentially telling us to try to bring our lives into closer alignment with the stone age design of our bodies.  Let's take a look at each of these factors and see what advice our stone age ancestors might have for us. 

Diet

According to the authors of an article on Paleolithic nutrition that appeared in "The New England Journal of Medicine",  "Human beings today are confronted with diet-related health problems that were previously of minor importance and for which prior genetic adaptation has poorly prepared us."[6]  Indeed, many of our most dangerous ailments, including ≥coronary heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and some types of cancer "have emerged as dominant health problems only in the past century and are virtually unknown among the few surviving hunter-gatherer populations"[7]   And this is not simply a result of our increased life-spans, as one might suppose.  Even adolescents in the Western world commonly show early forms of these conditions (restricted blood-flow in coronary arteries, high blood pressure, weight problems), while pre-agricultural adolescents do not.  Obesity and maturity-onset diabetes are among the first new health problems to appear when hunter-gathering people adopt our way of life.  And members of these cultures who live into their 60s and 70s generally remain lean and do not die from these ailments.

These researchers concluded that "the vitamin intake of paleolithic human beings would have substantially exceeded ours,"[8] owing to the wide variety of plant foods they typically ate.  And although they ate much more meat than even we steak-eating Americans do, they ate much less fat than us, and the fat they ate was substantially different from that in our diet.  How is this possible?

A survey of 15 different species of non-domesticated herbivores in Africa found a mean carcass fat content of about 4 per cent of body weight.  The same type of survey, when conducted on domesticated livestock, found a level of fat content from six to eight times higher!   Not only is there a great deal more fat in domesticated animals, its composition is quite different as well.  For example, wild game contains more than five times as much polyunsaturated fat per gram as domestic livestock.  And because of the unprocessed condition of the plant food they were eating, it seems reasonable to assume that paleolithic foods must also have contained a good deal more fiber than the modern diet, thus avoiding some of the problems that can come from a diet high in meat, such as colon cancer, for example.

 Stress / Exercise

In Walden, his classic celebration of simplicity, Henry David Thoreau wrote that our wealth can best be measured by counting up the things we can do without.   Others have called this approach the ≥Zen road to affluence,≤ that is, a life of apparent material poverty that is nonetheless very rich in other, less immediately obvious, ways.  Viewed from this perspective, the hunter-gatherers' lives were quite wealthy indeed!  In Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins puts it quite nicely when he says, "The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor.  Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people.  Poverty is a social status.  As such it is the invention of civilization."[9]

How much of the stress in our lives is a result of the constant struggle for things we don't really need?  Why is it that the traveler to some of the most ≥impoverished≤ places in the world is so often struck by the contagious happiness of the people?  And why do virtually all the world's spiritual disciplines advocate a life of material poverty?  Clearly, there is a liberation that comes from having very little to worry about, literally.  Perhaps freedom really is ≥just another word for nothing left to lose.≤

Any good doctor will tell you that getting enough exercise is one of the most important steps in reducing stress.  Through sophisticated analysis of skeletal remains, scientists are able to determine not only the size of our ancestors, but their strength as well.  These analyses, "consistently show that preagricultural humans were more robust than their descendents, including the average inhabitants of today's Western nations."  Furthermore, "this pattern holds whether the population being studied underwent the shift to agriculture 10,000 or only 1,000 years ago, so it clearly represents the results of habitual activity rather than genetic evolution."[10]  It seems that our ancestors got their exercise, and what's more, they got the right kind of cardio-vascular workout.  Once again, we find that what the medical world is 'discovering' about what the body needs is precisely what the body was designed, over millions of years, to do.  The latest research suggests that several short periods of intense activity per day (15-20 minutes), joined with the sort of endurance activity associated with hunting and gathering, offers the best workout for the heart and lungs.  This seems to be exactly what prehistoric life demanded.  A study of aerobic fitness conducted in 1988 found that hunter-gatherers had ≥superior≤ fitness, while the average Westerner was only ≥fair≤ (56.4 vs. 40.8 ml/kg/minute ≠ Maximal Oxygen Uptake).[11]

If they were used at all, tobacco and alcohol were used very differently by our ancestors than by us.  Some contemporary hunter-gatherers chew or smoke wild tobacco, but their use is seasonal, and they do not inhale the smoke.  And concerning alcohol, while there is some evidence of the knowledge of fermentation in isolated instances, of 95 hunter-gatherer societies studied in this century, almost half (46) didn't know how to produce alcoholic beverages.  In contrast, from 7 to 10 per cent of the average adult American's calories are supplied by alcohol.[12]  When alcohol is produced in hunter-gatherer societies, its use is limited by seasonal availability, strong ritual, and social constraints.  According to one study, ≥solitary, addictive, pathologic drinking behavior does not occur to any significant extent (in hunter-gatherer societies); such behavior appears to be a concomitant of complex, modern, industrialized societies.≤[13]

Despite this glowing description of life in Lascaux 20,000 years ago, we are not romanticizing tribal people.  Many tribes, both past and present, had customs that involved slavery, abuse of women and children, and so on.   In this article we are concerned with the physiological, rather than the cultural.

≥Fine,≤ we hear you saying, ≥they didn't smoke, didn't drink, and got lots of exercise. But what about basic hunger?  Wasn't life an unending quest for something to eat?≤ 

In the modern world, from one third to one half of humanity goes to bed hungry each night (depending upon whose estimates you believe).  Analysis of ancient bones and teeth strongly suggests that while hunter-gatherers were more likely to suffer from occasional temporary shortages of food, later prehistoric populations that relied upon agriculture had to endure periods of prolonged starvation, as do millions of our contemporaries today.  Many anthropologists have found that even contemporary hunter-gatherers spend around from four to five hours per day in food acquisition.[14]  And keep in mind that when reading studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, we are looking at people who exist on the fringes of the industrial world, on the last scraps of open land on earth.  The conditions of life for people who lived in richer areas must logically have been significantly better.  If it only takes 4-5 hours to take care of dietary needs for a day in the Australian outback, how long did it take along the salmon-filled rivers of Oregon, or in the lush hills of central France?  There must have been a lot of time left over for telling stories, sleeping, making love, and, if the spirit moved you, painting on the walls of caves!

What lessons can we take from this brief glimpse into the distant past?  First of all, we should always bear in mind the fact that our bodies evolved in response to a way of life very different from what we are familiar with.  Although it isn't  possible for most of us to quit our jobs and take up a hunter-gatherer existence, we can benefit greatly by replicating certain important aspects of primitive life in our own thoroughly modern times.

For example, current cancer-prevention recommendations ≠ to get regular exercise, cut down on fat and alcohol, reduce stress, eat a variety of fruits and vegetables with lots of fiber and vitamins ≠ essentially describe the diet and activity level of stone age life.

So when trying to choose a healthier lifestyle, listen to your stone age ancestors.  Exercise like they did: lots of walking, sustained activity with several short periods of more intense exertion.  Avoid tobacco and alcohol.  If you're going to use them, try to use them in a paleolithic way: keep your use very occasional and part of a ritual.  Eat a varied diet that is low in fat but high in fresh fruits, vegetables and fiber.  And perhaps most important of all, keep your life as stress-free as you can.  Try to maximize the time you spend in nature, watching the setting sun, noticing the change of the seasons, reaffirming your personal connection to the natural world and to your own body ≠ to all that you share with the distant human past.