HOMINID POWER

We are hominids first...

Lucy’s tracks tantalize like a four million year-old snapshot. They are preserved as Mary Leakey found them, accompanied by two human-ape companions striding calmly across a flood pan brought to busy life by other cast impressions of insects, birds, baboons, wildebeest, rhinos, giraffes, zebras, ostriches, hares, saber-toothed tigers, pigs – and three-toed horses called Hipparion.

It’s a long way from squelching naked through wet volcanic ash to wearing bras and sipping Scotch. Almost half that distance has been traversed by people lacking stone flints or fire. Yet we flick channels past the Flintstones, activate our microwaves, and board airplanes hardly noticing that Lucy’s in the cockpit adjusting her uniform and the GPS.

But she is. Hominids who share 99% of their DNA with chimps have been driving cars for a handful of decades, personal cyberspace is 10 years old. Yet tool-making proto-humans refined our rural reflexes for more than a million years – 10,000 times longer than their space-walking descendents have been channel-surfing so far.

So next time you drive downtown, pull over and try sharpening a stick. Feel its heft in your hand. Let neglected limbic learning gauge the wind and trajectory toward the nearest dik-dik herd. 

At least go for a walk in the park.

Not all of our four million year-old hunting-gathering instincts can be successfully sublimated by scoring the new "Tragically Hip" CD, or frozen sockeye for the barbecue. Especially when we spend so much of our waking hours racing around imitating machines, instead of honoring our hominid nature.

I’m not saying that healthy hominids have to kill their dinner with a rock. But we ignore archaic needs and reflexes at our peril.

The swerve to maladaptive "mass" society came just 5,000 years ago. In that time, we’ve developed presumptions and pretensions even more dangerous than our technologies.

The biggest blunder was to divorce Lucy and our innate links to clan, place and Nature – which is our own nature, after all. 

Evolutionary psychology looks at the Stone Age traits we’ve carried into the wired age. For example, says author William Allman, we OD on fatty foods today not because we’re undisciplined degenerates – but because fat was a scarce, high-caloric food for most of our prehistory, and we scarfed as much as we could find.

The Stone Age Present reminds us that millions of years of rough-and-tumble evolution have hard-wired our hunting and gathering instincts into autonomic responses which may be inappropriate to some of the challenges facing us now.

But it’s very instructive to trace how human priorities and approaches to sex, spirit, conversation, parenthood and personal destiny have been shaped by millions of years hunting, traveling, gathering, camping and moving on.

Some 60,000 years ago our apelike ancestors started acting more like people: sewing clothes, making razor-sharp tools, decorating caves, playing blues riffs on stone flutes – and negotiating and sharing cooperative ventures like food gathering and child-rearing. These folks were probably also stoned on magic mushrooms a lot. But that’s another story.

However it appeared, language answered an urgent social need.

"Their lifestyle was all about making agreements, wheeling and dealing, cooperating, discussion," speculate two University of Arizona linguists delightfully named Pinker and Bloom.

"It makes a difference whether that region has animals that you can eat or animals that can eat you. It makes a difference whether it has fruit that is ripe, or fruit that was ripe or fruit that will be ripe."

We draw on this legacy every time we pass along bargains on organic lettuce. But we can do much more to recognize and honor the hominid within.


HOMIND HEALTH PRESCRIPTION:
Remember your roots.

Drink at least eight glasses of pure water every day.

Primate grooming has nothing to do with sex. Touch and be touched as often as mutual intention allows.

Go easy on meat and factory foods, which weren’t easily come by in Lucy’s day. Graze instead on chemical-free fruits, seeds, buts, grains, berries and veggies – especially in the heat of summer.

Walk, lie, swim, run, eat, snooze, make out or just sit still in nature looking out your eyes. Do this as often as you can. Even a few minutes’ daily stroll in the woods or along the sea or lakeshore is a great de-stressor and re-connector.

Remember that your immune system is a porous organism. Besides being bathed regularly in water that’s juts water, skin needs to breathe the breeze and suck in sunny vitamin D, too. So shuck your clothes as often as you can without freezing delicate parts or freaking out the neighbors. (But watch your exposure to soaring solar radiation levels never before encountered by humans.10 minutes "a side" is max. And never at midday.

Try relating to members of other sexes and species as tribal relatives, guides and partners engaged in a common endeavor called life. Evolutionary psychology says that over many millennia women and men have developed different mental pathways and evolutionary goals.

Women concentrated on cultivating connections long before root crops. Men’s concern with hierarchical status and reputation was as instinctive as the Alpha apes around them. As we attempt to adjust antiquated roles and move away from dominator models, it might be helpful to acknowledge hard-wired tendencies without judgment, listen more and give each other some slack.