What Did We Inherit?
Our modern behaviours from an evolutionary standpoint
It is quite often that I find myself wondering about the past. The past which is in our collective genome that each of us shares and can relate to;
The lives of our ancestors!
The question looms in my head that “What did thousands of years of evolution bring us, exactly?
Let’s take a step back into the past to understand the context.
Around approximately 170,000 years ago, humans learned to wear clothing over their bodies. Back then, life was based around the absolute basic necessities such as air, water, food, shelter, safety & companionship.
Methods of obtaining these necessities and their effects were the constituents which resulted in frequent changes to human consciousness and its genome.
Acquiring these basic necessities for thousands of years has shaped our behaviors and habits. After thousands of years, the results of these habits can be seen among most of us. Let’s discuss some of those learned habits & behaviors:
Depression
“Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest and can interfere with your daily functioning”.
It is proven that any person who has a sibling or parent with depression is 20–30% more likely to develop depression in life.
Now consider for a moment that some of our ancestors, due to increasing age, started to lose their agility in gathering resources and could not partake in the hunting rituals. Therefore, they eventually felt like an outsider and non-capable to performing the survival tasks but were fit enough to procreate.
This feeling of being left out might have slowly sowed the seed for what we now call depression.
If we take a look further down the road, those ancestors who could not partake in traditions and collective activities felt left out the same way as those before them, which might have further fine-tuned the seed of depression in their genome. Continuous fine-tuning eventually led to this diagnosable disorder in modern humans.
Hyper awareness & the sense of danger
We as species are hunters and foragers. Remaining aware of the surroundings was a crucial aspect of staying alive.
From carnivore beasts to poisonous crawlers, one small neglect to changing stimuli & death would be knocking at the door. From an evolutionary perspective, we learned to stay alert and aware.
Fast forward to today and we do not have life-threatening danger around us because we have built strong walls and hard floors that keep us safe.
However, there is still danger out there.
The danger of uncertainty in job situations, not getting admission to the right university, and so on. Our danger is now on the inside, arising from our own desires.
This type of danger made us hyper-aware of our situations, such as earning a livelihood, societal acceptance, or securing a loving partner, among other things. This hyper-awareness results in constant struggle even with all the modernity of today’s world.
Laziness
Contrary to the previous point, laziness also prevails in our modern behaviors. Generally, we tend to avoid the tasks where our energies would be drained. For example, taking the elevator for a few floors and not taking the stairs.
Our ancestors were always on their feet to gather resources. Gradually, the effort reduced and they started relying on simplistic tools like hammerstones, axes & eventually wheels which reduced the workload.
Through industrialization in the recent past, we acquired the luxury of not doing excessive hard work to acquire basic necessities which subsequently made us lazy. As dependence on industries and farming rose, so did our ease. It gave us time to focus on expanding our consciousness but at the cost of sloth.
Overindulgence in food
Back then resources were scarce and gathering them was a fairly tough task. In translation, there was always less food to consume.
There was no agriculture & no animal farming and our ancestors relied on hunting animals and plants for survival. In harsh weather, they even went through stretches of fasts due to scarcity of resources.
Now, due to industrialization, our consumables are taken care of and we have access to all sorts of foods. The transition from then to now saw a major shift in eating habits.
According to WHO, In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese.
This is because we now have access to more food than we can consume and human nature has greed built-in & greed made us lose control.
Anxiety
Anxiety is constant unrest, unease, and the fear of the future.
Our ancestors had no reason to think about their distant future. They were living their lives in an immediate-return environment. This is where their actions had instantaneous results;
Sensing a predator? Move away. Feeling Hunger? Hunt rabbits and eat.
All actions had an immediate result.
Today’s human is living in a Delayed return environment; actions that we take do not have immediate results.
Need financial stability? Requires years of hard work. Want to be with someone? There’s courtship and partnership rituals in place.
In the major aspects of our lives, we live by a delayed return environment.
Human brains have not evolved for delayed gratification
In the last 500 years, our lives have become swift, we can travel anywhere on the globe in a matter of a day which previously took months of journey.
The most tormenting factor is uncertainty. In comparison to the past, our ancestors did not struggle with it but it is all we have today!!
The Takeaway
As species, we have come a long way and there’s still a long way to go. We need the help of research & knowledge to overcome these problems as we continue our journey in this universe. It is crucial that the next phase of evolution discards these behaviors and adopts a continuously healthy approach. That way we can ensure physical and mental fitness for generations to come.
Note:
This article stands on the basis of assumptions and interconnectedness of a certain chain of events. These are not scientifically proven facts but speculations on human behaviors and their subsequent results.
— I am Fatima Khan and you can reach out to me on my socials here:
