To understand: Sapien: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
The lessons we can learn from the ancient foragers. Link of Harari’s book Sapien, published in 2014.
Hunter-Gather Genes:
Every time I go to the dentist, the dental hygienist would ask me about my sugar intake. Similarly, when I go to the doctors for checkup, they would ask me to have a blood test to check my blood glucose and and blood cholesterol. It is grilled in my mind that sweets and greasy food are bad for my health. Yet, I often wonder why we as a species binge on sweetest and greasiest food. According to Harrari’s Sapien, we have inherited the gorging gene.
In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food — ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare.
The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with…
