Sublime

Or was it? There was a serpent in the hunter-gatherer

Arthur Newton, the father of Long Slow Distance training, persuaded the British

Observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer bands support this idea. Most bands are highly egalitarian, and when a hunter comes back to camp carrying a fat deer, everybody gets a share. The same is true of chimpanzees.

In a few remarkable pages of The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case for group selection, raised the principal objection to it, and then proposed a way around the objection: When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, s

When intensive kin-based institutions persist, national-level democratic institutions

It is around seven million years since our ancestors started evolving into the modern humans we are today.5 During this process of evolution we have spent more than 99.99 per cent of our time living in a natural environment. Our bodies are adapted to nature.6

We are still animals, and our physical, emotional and cognitive abilities are still shaped by our DNA. Our societies are built from the same building blocks as Neanderthal or chimpanzee societies, and the more we examine these building blocks – sensations, emotions, family ties – the less difference we find between us and other apes. It is,

Ancient bodies and brains, modern culture, disruptive technologies, each pulling in different directions. The wheel is not only out of round, it’s also accelerating. This is a recipe for disaster.

A young hunter who risked his life chasing a mammoth outshone all his competitors and won the hand of the local beauty; and we are now stuck with his macho genes.11