“The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.”

Eric Hoffer
(1902 – 1983)

The “friking amazing” persistence hunt video is going around and you’ve really got to see it. It gives us the flavor of an authentic persistence hunt and is obviously useful in giving us a sense of primal human experience. But don’t get lulled into believing that this is the ultimate look at our ancestral heritage. These are true !Kung bushmen, but they are moderns and this is a re-creation of a historical event. Please note the shoes, the plastic water bottle and the metal spear. Not only that, we have to remember that this is only one hunt by one tribe in one bioregion, in one moment in time. Any conclusions that we might draw from this movie should be tentative.

Obvious flaws aside, this video gives us some good ideas for speculation. Most obviously, note the high level of environmental awareness. These hunters make every movement decision on environmental grounds. There are no highway cones, no white stripes painted on the concrete, no volunteers with stopwatches. Every single physical action is tied to terrain, plants, animals and weather. There are no arbitrary physical movements. Everything is in context. Everything is a judgment call. Walk? Run? Sit in the shade? All of these movement decisions are intimately tied to natural conditions. This is something we can take to heart. Instead of charging off down the road like a machine, we might do better to look around first.

“As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.”

• Lewis Thomas, in The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

“Nothing is more fatal to health than an overcare of it.”

• Benjamin Franklin

Another sign of transformation. See this editorial in the July 2007 issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

The medical community is starting to come around to the idea that exercise doesn’t have to be lumped into a single high-intensity bout. Rather, it can be distributed over the course of the day; a lifestyle which parallels our history as hunter-gatherers. Our paleo ancestors certainly had their moments of intense physicality, but the defining quality of their lives was their consistent locomotion throughout the day. In other words, lots of walking!

If you’ve been following the study of human prehistory for awhile, you may have been struck by the sheer weight of complexity and controversy. No one can split hairs like a paleoscientist and no discipline seems so murky and incomprehensible. But every now and then someone comes up with an idea that brings clarity to our ancient past.

This is precisely what we find in Richard Wrangham’s new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Once you read it, you’ll be struck by the tremendous power of his explanation. For Wrangham, the pivotal movement in human history came when our ancestors first began to heat food by the fire. Suddenly, our food became far more nutritious and gave us a tremendous survival edge. Not only were cooking tribes more likely to survive, but they now had to put less energy into digestion. This allowed for bigger brains and in turn, a positive feedback loop of better food gathering, better hunting and better cooking. Over thousands of generations, cooking allowed us to evolve from modest scavengers and gatherers into the intellectual super-predators that we are today.

This book is fascinating.

This game is both fun and burly: Sink down in your stance and start working your partner with tugs, releases and heckles. Keep stepping and moving. The object is not to “win” but to keep the action in play. The key lies in setting up the right relationship; the primary objective is to make sure that the other person has a good experience. Keep adjusting the intensity and the direction. This game can be fast or slow and meditative.

This is a good example of what you can do with low-tech toys such as ropes. For more ideas on natural training, or to become an Exuberant Animal trainer, visit www. exuberantanimal.com

One of the last remaining hunter-gathering groups on the planet. We departed camp at dawn and hunted up a broad wash. The hunters stopped occasionally for a smoke and a chat, then kept moving. I missed the actual kill (a small colobus monkey), but was able to witness the feast.

We didn’t always live in urban environments, supported by agricultural civilization. In fact, for the vast majority of our time on earth, we have lived in semi-wooded mosaic grasslands: a predator-rich environment. This footage was taken in 2000 in East Africa, in Tanzania. Imagine what your life must have been like, living in this kind of habitat.