A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

The Corrective Lens

Rites of passage thus coordinate society with respect to what is expected of individuals at various stages of development, and they exist in two forms: temporal (age) and, loosely, merit (earned).

Allow celestial bodies to set your sleep-wake pattern. Wake with the sun. Know the phases of the moon. Navigate sometimes by the light of the full moon. Navigate sometimes as dawn emerges, or as dusk falls, paying attention to the shifting of your senses as light becomes more, or less, available. Spend time outside, letting your body take cues from

Be the kind of person you want them to become. Monkey see, monkey do. Don’t be surprised if your children eat processed food and ask to buy things at every…

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Let your children sleep. Sleep plays a crucial role in brain development, and when synapses—the connections between neurons—are being generated at a very…

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Breastfeed your infants, if you can. Adults who were breastfed have better-formed palates and better-aligned teeth compared to those who were bottle-fed;20 and breast milk has in it all manner of nutrients and information that we do not understand. It may, for instance, contain cues with which the infant entrains his sleep-wake cycle. Thus, if you

Do not forget that food is social lubrication for humans. Eating alone in your car after visiting the drive-through is a novel situation, and it’s not helping us connect with our food, our bodies and their needs, or one another.

Monogamy: individuals of both sexes have just one partner at a time

In organisms, we know what causes senescence (the tendency to grow feeble with age). It is antagonistic pleiotropy, the propensity of selection to favor heritable traits that provide early life benefits even when they carry inevitable late life costs.3 This willingness to accept harm in old age occurs because selection sees the early life benefits