Our ancestors were much stronger than us — here's how to rebuild those abilities

Experts claim that learning to resist extreme conditions could help to transform our health (Getty)

There's a lot we don't know about our Paleolithic ancestors and their fitness. We can't exactly put them through a modern strength test or fitness routine.

But we do know that thousands of years ago, those ancestors spread out across the globe, traversing deserts like the Sahara and freezing regions like Siberia, scaling mountain ranges like the Alps and Himalayas, and even crossing segments of the ocean to populate new lands.

When you consider the physical feats those people accomplished, they put us all to shame.

But the ability to accomplish all that wasn't due to a superpower that has been genetically lost, as Scott Carney, the author of "What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength," recently explained in a TEDx Talk at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Those abilities are what he calls "human powers" — and we can still learn to resist cold, survive extreme heat, and last on long journeys at high altitudes.

"Our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has walked the earth for about 200,000 years. In that time, we endured crippling cold and scorching heat. We trekked out of the Middle East over the Alps, over the Himalayas. We even populated the New World without a whisper of what any one of us would consider modern technology," Carney said. "Our most valuable asset in all of this has been our body. It doesn't matter whether it's a snowstorm or a scorching sun — our bodies had to adapt quickly if we wanted to survive."

A third pillar of fitness

Carney says that rebuilding those abilities to resist extreme conditions would do more than just let us enjoy a swim in an icy lake — there's good evidence that doing so could transform our health.

The argument is that our bodies adapted to have mechanisms that help us respond to extreme temperatures and other environmental conditions. Without engaging the parts of our circulatory systems that help us cope with extreme heat and cold, Carney says, we weaken those mechanisms. And that weakness could play a role in cardiovascular illness.

Someone with a seemingly perfect body might be hiding weak circulatory muscles, Carney said in his talk. And there is evidence that our bodies are ready to adapt to extremes if we put them in those circumstances.

"There's an entire hidden biology honed to deal with various environmental conditions," Carney said. "Extreme heat will let your pores encourage evaporation. If you go into the cold, you will ramp up your metabolism. If you go into altitude, you will get more red blood cells in order to compensate for the decreased oxygen."

Medical research affirms at least some of this. Studies have found that a combination of exposure to cold and learned breathing techniques can help people gain a limited amount of control over their immune system, which was previously thought to be involuntary. Data also suggests that cold exposure could help people lose weight and counteract some effects of Type 2 diabetes.

Others have argued that emulating our Paleolithic ancestors could help us regain some sort of lost fitness in other ways. That's the idea behind the various versions of a paleo diet, though what such a diet should comprise is more complicated than many adherents would have you think.

When it comes to pure physical fitness, the author of "Born to Run," Christopher McDougall — who popularised a back-to-human-basics style of endurance running — put forth some pretty strong arguments in his latest book, "Natural Born Heroes," for workouts like climbing and parkour that emphasise natural movements.

In a way, this fits with what Carney is asking people to try: challenging themselves with the sort of obstacles and environments that we find in nature.

Carney asks in his TEDx Talk: "What was it about our ancestors that was so much stronger?"

His answer: "The difference between your Paleolithic grandfather and grandmother and us is that we have the ability to manipulate the world around us with technology." But perhaps relying too much on that technology makes us weak.

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