What We Can Learn From Ancient History (and What We Can’t)

Pity the poor Homo sapiens. In the great museums of the future, the display on their lives ca. 2024 will surely be among the least impressive. Picture them now, hunched over their little laminate desks, faces lit by the dim glow of screens, their teeth crooked, their muscles flabby, their eyes faulty, their torsos robed in fat siphoned from hyper-processed foods. Six million years of evolution — and for this?

Tormented by a fragmented hyper-modernity, sickened by industry and banished from any authentic contact with nature — is it any wonder that we moderns have turned back to ancient history, and even prehistory, in pursuit of health and happiness? People today use the conjectured habits of our distant ancestors as a guide to diet, birth, sex, dentistry, defecation, and much else beyond. The Paleo diet counsels the elimination of such post-Neolithic innovations as sugar, alcohol and grain in order to gain fit bodies and healthy smiles. The Squatty Potty promises to return its users to primal bathroom mechanics. Proponents of polyamory draw inspiration from the book