Those Lazy Hunter-Gatherers!

A lot of us in the keto lifestyle, as well as those on Paleo, look to the lifestyles of Paleolithic Man for our role models. I think there is a lot of projection in this. If we fast, we tend to think that Paleolithic Man went without food a lot. If we are gym-rats who spend hours in the gym working out every week, we figure Paleolithic Man went through the same exertion every day.

But studies of more modern hunter-gatherers may show us that our ideas are wrong. A researcher, Dr. Herman Pontzer, studied the Hazda of Tanzania. They often travel 15 - 20 miles a day to gather food. That seems like a lot more than we do today! But Dr. Pontzer says “We found that despite all this physical activity, the number of calories that the Hazda burned per day was indistinguishable from that of typical adults in Europe and the United States.”

We are deceived about this by our culture, which says we are lazy and sedentary because of modern machines, and that in the past people worked more. But in the past, people did physically demanding leisure activities far less. When you read the Laura Ingalls Wilder ‘Little House’ books, she doesn’t remember her pa ‘going to the gym’ or playing golf on the weekends. He was more likely to spend his time hunting or harvesting hay. 

The modern craze for exercise is not the human norm. When we look at REAL hunter-gatherers, we often see inactivity. I remember reading of one group in which the tribe’s women complained that their ‘hunter’ men tended not to do much. 

But there is a biological reason for hunter-gatherers not to expend energy beyond their needs. The more you do, the more you have to eat to support that activity. A couple of successful hunters could bring down a deer or two that could keep a whole tribe eating for a few days, especially if the group also had some gathered vegetable food and perhaps some snared rabbits or possums. Would the hunters really run around expending needless energy after that? No, they’d alternate resting days with the bigger-animal hunting expeditions. And it probably only took one or two people to check any snares that were set.

We know that excess exercise in our own day can cause exercise-related injury. It’s not a big deal for us, because many of us have jobs we can do sitting at a desk while an ankle heals. Or we can have paid time off if we cannot work our job for a while, or at least we can get food from a food bank or a government program. Among hunter-gatherers, injury could be quite damaging to the whole group. What if it was the lead hunter who couldn’t work for a while? So extra energy expenditure was also a risk to survival. I imagine we wouldn’t find Paleolithic Man inventing tennis, jousting or football for a spare-time activity. When not actively hunting or gathering or doing other essential tasks like drying food for winter use, they probably took things easy.

Human beings didn’t give up being hunter-gatherers because that way of life was too hard. A farmer who grew crops with hand tools or a livestock owner who had to care for the herd every day would have to work harder. The reason for giving up hunter-gatherer life was that there were associated restrictions. Hunter-gatherers could not live too near other hunter-gatherers, or the food resources of the area would be used up. That’s why American Indians were so threatened when the settlers moved in near them— they grew their food on less land, and competed in using the hunting/fishing resources.

Also, real cities could not begin while people were still hunter-gatherers, or even nomadic herdsmen. They needed large-scale plant agriculture— grains, mostly— to feed a city population. And that was the beginning of the ‘diseases of civilization.’ Egyptian mummies show many of the same health problems we have because of their grain-based diet.

I think the lesson we can learn is that we should not presume those Paleolithic ancestors of ours were expending the energy of a modern fellow who runs marathons or spends hours at the gym. Since ‘you can’t outrun a bad diet,’ we who have changed our diets for the better should have to jump on the bandwagon of extremes of exercise. More moderate exercise plans may be better, more natural, and easier to stick with.