The Noble Savage Analysis

According to Marlene Zuk many of the expectations on which it is founded are questionable. While not disregarding the position of development in shaping us, we also find that it is also quite conflicting. Zuk picks the assumptions of the ‘paleofantasists’ (paleofantasists stem from the idea that development makes tiny changes over millions of years, so we haven't had sufficient time to adapt to the modern industrial world—and that we would be healthier and happier if we lived more like our ancient ancestors.) to pieces and shows how ill-started many of their ideas are. Personally, this just proved that the current interest for life in the Palaeolithic is just a modern version of the myths of the Noble Savage or an earthly version of the legend

True, we can infer an astonishing amount of this information these days from archaeology, thanks to improvements in technology, and there is also valued information to be inferred from genetics, but there will always exist vast areas of unawareness. In an attempt to fill in some of the gaps, people repeatedly look to the behaviours of chimpanzees, our closest existing relatives. Another possible source of information is studies of the (very few) hunter-gatherer civilizations, but it is unsure that any of these civilizations live any way closer to their ancestors or our remote ancestors. In any case, which hunter-gatherer civilizations should we choose? Humans have adapted to widely differing surroundings, from deserts to tropical forests and the frozen areas of the Arctic, and the solutions they adopted by living in these places were equally

A recurring theme in this book is that development can, and does, occur over much smaller time spans than many people believe. One piece of indication, discussed in some parts of this book, is the perseverance beyond childhood of the enzyme, lactase that allows adults to digest the lactose in milk (To some extent it is true. Our bodies are ill-suited for inactively siting while working with computers all day, for example. Because people were initially created and lived in a way whereby they were not bent over computers, sitting that way all day is going to have ill effects. But it's more nuanced than that. Being bipedal has a lot of costs on the humanoid skeleton, too. Should we all long to be animals? It just doesn't make sense. ). This growth is quite recent and has seemed only in those people whose ancestors learnt to domesticate cows and use them to provide them with milk (Forbes,