(Re)Introduction of the naked ape

Various therapies and coaching methods refer to evolutionary biological and anthropological principles without it being made clear that these principles are based on a different conceptual thinking. That is not surprising, because until recently evolution was mainly the domain of biologists and psychologists. Within medical science, our evolutionary history of development strangely enough does not (yet) play a major role. Supported by our philosophical way of looking at the world, with a leading role for the mind, this still leads to a systematic overvaluation of the head and undervaluation of the body.

The search for evolutionary connections in modern diseases and disorders certainly involves a high degree of curiosity in the causes of it - rather than just in the symptoms. ULTRAFYSIO helps to clarify (evolutionary) causes and guides in changing (own) behaviour in favor of better health. Since it is difficult for many people to see themselves first and foremost as animals, as zoologist Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape, 1969) has been telling us for decades, we are not inclined to rely on our old stress response and reward system again. To regain that trust, a better evoluionary awareness is indispensable.

Evolutionary consciousness

Our physique is shaped by natural selection and dates back millions of years. Since then, nothing has changed in an evolutionary sense. At hte same time, developments in our environment have followed each other at lightning speed: from hunter/gatherer to agriculture, then to the industrial era, and now we are already living in the digital age. Due to the mismatch with our environment, we have behaved more and more unnaturally, with the result that we now suffer massively from all kinds of modern-time diseases such as obesity, high blood pressure, chronic back pain, burnout, depression, asthma, etc (Daniel Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body).

Because we don’t see that we are actually beasts, we overlook the fact that there is a huge gap between who we are and what we can do. Between what we do and what evolution has equipped us for, our bodies can’t always keep up with our brain. In order to understand which modern-age diseases and disorders that gaping hole leads to, you must first realize that you are an animal, a human animal.

Only with sufficient knowledge about our evolution as a species (instead of as an individual) can you crack the code of your (evolutionary) subconscious and tackle modern-time diseases better. Diseases and disorders that seem to have nothing to do with each other, have and can be traced back to these findings:

• We are (evolutionarily) built on scarcity of food (of the time as hunter/gatherer), but now live in an environment with constant abundance. The global epidemic of type 2 diabets is almost at the same time as that of overweight and obesity.

• Our backs became the carrier of extra weight when our ancestors came out of the trees and started walking on two legs. Because our spine was not originally designed for that, back pain has become the universal complaint of our species. But numerous foot problems, intestinal wall hernia and varicose veins can also be directly linked to this evolutionary change.

• We are confronted with modern stressors to which our ancient stress system responds with alarming non-functional physical phenomena, such as increased blood pressure, insomnia, chronic fatigue, decreased appetite, psychomotor inhibition.

• The dramatic change in our environment has caused many of us to breathe incorrectly. The breathing process is affected by chronic stress, a sedentary lifestyle, an unhealthy diet, overly warm houses and a general lack of fitness. The body often no longer knows by itself how much air it needs.

So our fantastic brain easily leads us astray when it comes to what’s good for our bodies or not. But this brain, with its enormous neocortex, fortunately also allows us to learn how evolution works, to know why your body was formed over billions of years and to understand what the consequences are. If you know how you came into being, you also know why your body thrives on, for example, moving and being outside - activities to which it is evolutionary adapted, and not stressing motionlessly behind a screen inside - an activity to which evolution has not yet made adjustments.

With better evolutionary awareness, you better understand why sweating hands and a faster heart rate in case of danger are meant adaptively. Namely to be able to run away hard and to lose heat during flights or fights. These were useful body reactions in prehistoric times, but usually not in our time when the stress continues and you thereby increase your inflammatory factors in your blood. Then you want to stay in your bed. If you as an organism used to have inflammation, it was important to survive that you kept quiet for a while. Compare that to your wisdom tooth: we no longer need to grind our meat, so we no longer need that cutting edge.

Examples of evolutionary (mis)adaptation

An increasingly bent over body posture as a result of our domestication on two legs is a clear example of evolutionary misadaptation. An evironment that no longer invites regular, full-body stretching - as happens in an evironment where daily activities such as running, climbing, swimming, throwing belong - leads to a gradual ‘dropping’ of the shoulder girdle and forward leaning hips (Theodore Dimon, The Body in Motion, 2011). The stretching muscles are increasingly losing their length, resp. the ability to maintain proper body posture - i.e. with least possible energy expenditure and pressure on the joints. If we compare western people with, for example, African people, we more often see shorter hamstrings and lowered shoulder girdles. The consequences of a common ‘weak body posture’ in the longer term are now visible in, among other things, long waiting lists for hip replacement operations and a great need for physiotherapeutic treatment and exercise of the neck and shoulder girdle muscles.

Our light skin color due to less exposure to sunlight is another good example of evolutionary adaptation. Light skin allows more UV rays to pass through than darker ones. Most likely, the lighter skin has also become light for that reason; when homo sapiens moved from sunny Africa to the less sunny north, those with lighter skin had an evolutionary advantage over those with darker skin, for their lighter skin allowed more of the no longer abundant sunlight to pass through (Daniel Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body, 2013). Or in other words: Dark skin protects against UV radiation and in a tropical climate with many intensive hours of sunshine, allows enough sunlight to pass through to make vitamin D. This is not the case in a European climate. People who spend a large part of the day indoors and/ or live in a fully built-up city, come into contact with sunlight less than would be good for them and run the risk of a vitamin D deficiency. That is not only bad for the bones, but also for the mood.

Perhaps less appealing to the imagination, but certainly no less important, is the adaptation of our breathing. We are actually a lot more athletic than our fellow primates. As a hunting ape, we once became ‘chasers, riders, jumpers, pitchers and prey killers’ (Desmond Morris, Manwatching, 1977). The bodies of higher primates are much less suitable for fast sprints or prolonged performance that requires great endurance. For example, gorillas have a range of no more than a few kilometers. For us, the lower regions of our brains formed in environments where there were always physical challenges to overcome, and those challenges made it much easier to maintain an efficient diet and breathing pattern. Now that those demeanors have largely disappeared, we are breathing more and more air. While sitting at a computer, we sometimes breathe in two to three times more air than we need, without knowing it. We call this ‘chronic over-breathing’. Chronic over-breathing simply means that you are constantly using a greater amount of air than is necessary for your body (Patrick McKeown, OxygenAdvantage, 2015).

An adaptation that we know more and more about thanks to a lot of research over the last ten years is that of our ‘thermostat’. As a biological response to our lives in clothes and heated homes, we now know that we have lost much of the so-called ‘brown fat’ in our bodies. That is a type of fat that we use directly for warming up the body by burning fatty acids and glucose. It prevents babies - who, unlike most adults, do not have muscles to warm themselves up - from falling prey to the cold in their first months. Most brown fat usually disappears quickly, but evolutionary biologists consider it very likely that the first man had higher concentrations to arm himself against extreme conditions. Without brown fat, cold is quickly experienced as uncomfortable and we start shivering and shivering to stay warm (Scott Carney, What does not kill us.., 2017).

Because most people make every effort to avoid extreme situations, they never make brown fat at all and can only hold their breath for a short time. But with that knowledge, more and more training methods and therapies have been introduced over the years that link these adaptations to numerous modern-time diseases. ULTRAFYSIO presents only a few of them.