"[F]rom the time of our emergence as Homo sapiens, perhaps as long as 195,000 years ago (McDougall et al. 2005; White et al. 2003), we have lived as hunter-gatherers, picking fruit from trees, foraging wild grains, digging for vegetables, and hunting animals both large and small. The power of our own experiences, “living in the now” and the effects of socialization that make “normal” simply what we are used to, can obscure the fact that the technocratic society we know and reproduce in today accounts for less than 1% of human history (Table 1). Only 1-2% of our biological make-up has evolved since the ape-human split between 5 and 7 million years ago, meaning that the vast majority of our genes are ancient in origin (Trevathan et al. 2008). There have been a few simple genetic changes since the third little pig and his wife invented agriculture around 10-12,000 years ago, but the pace of cultural evolution is generally much faster than biological evolution. As a result, humans today occupy 35,000-year-old model bodies that are not particularly well adapted to the technocratic and industrializing cultures many of us live in (Armelagos et a. 2005; Eaton et al. 2002)."
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Human genome
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