The Savannah man

Recent advances in genetics and anthropology have evidenced that our current genome is very similar to that of our ancestors who lived in the Savannah after the latest glaciation about 10,000 years ago. This was right before the invention of agriculture.

If this is correct, the logical next step is to question what kind of life these humans had in terms of nutrition and physical activity and see if this can teach us something about what modern days homo-sapiens should do to stay optimally fit. Given the very hash living conditions prevailing in those days, if our ancestors had been obese, suffered from high cholesterol or diabetes or simply have lacked sufficient physical fitness, they would have gone extinct long ago and we would not be here to talk about them.


Because agriculture did not exist yet, the Savannah man was a hunter-gatherer. This implies that he had to be able to walk and run long distances on a regular basis to either gather the food he consumed or hunt game with his fellow tribesmen. In addition to being able to move more or less rapidly on foot, which is an aerobic activity, he absolutely needed sufficient muscle power for example to throw spears from afar at large animals and defend himself against them or other humans, which are predominantly anaerobic activities.

His diet was mainly made up of fruits, roots, nuts and meat. I am not an advocate of the so-called "caveman diet" or "paleolithic diet" though (some would like to have us believe that this was a kind of golden era for humanity. They simply forget to mention that life expectancy was around 30 and malnutrition was rampant).

However, I believe that something very practical can be learned from these pre-agricultural times: because our genome has not changed since those days, and evolution has shaped our ancestors genome in such a way as to maximize survival chances, it is reasonable to think that our bodies are still "intended" to be used in the same way as those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who practiced both aerobic and anaerobic activities on a daily basis.

In practical terms, our physical health can probably be maximized by walking/running (or its modern equivalents such as riding a bicycle) and lifting some kind of weight (or vigorously working around the garden) on a daily basis because this is what evolution had shaped us to do before it stopped.

This would confirm my long-held belief that neither aerobic nor anaerobic exercises alone can maximize our health. Human beings probably still need both forms of exercise on a very regular basis to stay fit. How often and with what intensity is another issue I will deal with in a later post.