Not long ago our days were shaped by movement, sunlight, and moments of danger that came and went. Our bodies still live in that world, even though our lives don’t.
According to evolutionary anthropologists Colin Shaw and Daniel Longman, we evolved to handle acute stress in brief cycles: the lion appears, you react, the lion leaves, body recovers.
Today, the lions never leave.
Traffic noise. Endless notifications. Workplace pressure. Artificial light. Your body can't tell the difference between a tense meeting and a predator—it mobilizes the same survival response, over and over, with no time to recover.
The consequences are showing up everywhere. Rising rates of inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. Declining fertility across much of the world. A documented drop in sperm count and motility since the 1950s, linked to environmental exposures like pesticides and microplastics. Shaw calls it a paradox: unprecedented comfort and medical advancement, paired with quiet erosion of immune, cognitive, and reproductive health.
The researchers are clear: their call is not to abandon progress, but to redesign it. To treat nature as public health infrastructure. To build cities that reduce harmful exposures and support human physiology.
Perhaps the most important takeaway is that our bodies aren't broken. They're ancient. And they're asking us, politely but persistently, to listen.
READ: HUMANS ARE BUILT FOR NATURE
Not long ago our days were shaped by movement, sunlight, and moments of danger that came and went. Our bodies still live in that world, even though our lives don’t.
According to evolutionary anthropologists Colin Shaw and Daniel Longman, we evolved to handle acute stress in brief cycles: the lion appears, you react, the lion leaves, body recovers.
Today, the lions never leave.
Traffic noise. Endless notifications. Workplace pressure. Artificial light. Your body can't tell the difference between a tense meeting and a predator—it mobilizes the same survival response, over and over, with no time to recover.
The consequences are showing up everywhere. Rising rates of inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. Declining fertility across much of the world. A documented drop in sperm count and motility since the 1950s, linked to environmental exposures like pesticides and microplastics. Shaw calls it a paradox: unprecedented comfort and medical advancement, paired with quiet erosion of immune, cognitive, and reproductive health.
The researchers are clear: their call is not to abandon progress, but to redesign it. To treat nature as public health infrastructure. To build cities that reduce harmful exposures and support human physiology.
Perhaps the most important takeaway is that our bodies aren't broken. They're ancient. And they're asking us, politely but persistently, to listen.
READ: HUMANS ARE BUILT FOR NATURE