There's nothing so absurd that someone won't propose it

For example, we are bombarded with information, much of it incorrect, about food and diet. At the edges this bleeds off into the truly absurd:

However “civilised” we may now consider ourselves to be, biologically we are much closer to our stone age ancestors. There is a major mismatch between our modern urbanised world and our “paleolithic genome”, the genetic material encoded in our DNA, which supports an ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Put simply, urbanisation – which began with the advent of farming – is bad for us. Studies of skeletal remains in cemetery sites show that when the Romans introduced town life to Britain 2,000 years ago, they also introduced us to scurvy, rickets, osteomalacia, Reiter’s syndrome, gout, ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, septic arthritis, tuberculosis, osteitis, poliomyelitis and leprosy. And today, the most common causes of death in half of our urban populations are obesity, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure and various cancers. It is a sobering thought that all these conditions are rare or non-existent in non-urban societies, such as the tribal communities in Kitava, Papua New Guinea.

Certainly we agree that much about humans doesn't make sense unless we understand our own genesis. We really are apes who got lucky with that intelligence thing. But we do rather like the idea that we should apply that intelligence.

The diseases which tend to kill our urban populations today are those of age. Kitava?

Kitava has 2,300 inhabitants and the life expectancy at birth is estimated at 45

Err, yes.

And the Kitavans are also farmers and do not lead a hunter gatherer lifestyle nor eat like such.

That human intelligence is precious because it's so rare.....
 

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