Over the last year or two, I’ve noticed how both Neanderthals and the distant human past have started appearing over and over again in discussions of life in the modern world. At the core of this Paleo-revival is a belief that the distant evolutionary past holds lessons for how we should live today. Since evolution works on very long and slow time-scales (the theory goes), our bodies are quite simply not well adapted to life in the Anthropocene. All we need to do is to copy the diet/lifestyle/habits of Stone Age man and we can avoid the negative effects of the modern world on our bodies. Neanderthals, on the other hand, seems to have become a kind of evolutionary noble savage, a distant and exotic Other upon which we can project our ideals and wishes for how a simple life outside of the Anthropocene might be. A red thread running through this argument is pure nostalgia, a desire to go back to when things supposedly were simpler and when the problems we had to deal with were not quite as wicked. If the current state of the world is a result of human activities, then Paleolithic man is only marginally complicit, having existed at a time when we still had a choice. The Neanderthals, on the other hand, are completely innocent and can not be blamed for the Anthropocene. The illustration below – one of many “evolution of man” spoofs that circulate on the internet – demonstrates this idea wonderfully. The Paleolithic age, more commonly called “the Stone Age” started about 2,6 million years ago and ended about 10000 years ago, during which humans evolved from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens sapiens, in other words what is fundamentally modern humans. Today, consumers can emulate Stone Age life in many ways. For instance, the Paleolithic diet started appearing as a modern nutritional plan in the 1970s, and its proponents argued that…
Part of a series of blog posts I wrote on the Anthropocene for Umeå University’s Forskarbloggen in 2013.