What Hunter-Gatherers Know That We’ve Forgotten
- krischetcuti
- May 9
- 3 min read
We've spent the last few centuries trying to distance ourselves from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, by which I mean inventing sofas, office jobs, packet soup, and trousers that dig into our liver. But what if, bear with me here, they actually had it sussed?
True, they didn’t have coffee. Or supermarkets. Or chairs. But they also didn’t have statins, burnout, or chronic inflammation. No lifestyle cancers like breast or colon cancer. No Type 2 diabetes or dementia. No high cholesterol or heart attacks. You’d be surprised how often I find myself, mid-coaching session, thinking: “What would a Hadza do?”
The Hadza, by the way, are a modern-day hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania, still living as humans did for tens of thousands of years. They walk about 12k steps a day, eat wild tubers, berries, and lean meat they actually hunted for days on end, and have some of the healthiest gut microbiomes on the planet.
Then there’s the Tsimané of Bolivia, possibly the people with the healthiest hearts on Earth. Their arteries are so clean you could serve soup out of them. They live off fish and plantains, and they walk a lot. Constant, gentle movement. No gym selfies. No protein powders. Just, well, life.
And the San people of the Kalahari? Beautiful posture. Natural squatting. Sleep synced with sunset. Zero chairs. Imagine.
All of this isn’t just interesting, it’s deeply inconvenient for modern life. Because the real takeaway from studying hunter-gatherers isn’t “let’s go live in a cave.” It’s this: our bodies were designed for a lifestyle we left behind, and now we're paying for it with our ill-health.
So what can we learn from modern-day hunter-gatherer societies?
They move all the time not aggressively but rhythmically, as part of survival. Foraging, hunting, dancing, hauling things.
They eat real food, seasonally, with the odd long gap of fasting in between when food is not so easy to come by.
They sleep when it gets dark and wake up with the light. No eating biscuits mid-night. No scrolling. No blue light. Just... stars.
They aren't alone. Community is non-negotiable. You need your tribe or you die.
So here I am, a Maltese health coach getting all starry-eyed over charcoal and bones found in a Mellieha cave, while archaeologists reveal we had hunter-gatherers in Malta 8,500 years ago.
And I think: well, why wouldn’t they have come here? It’s stunning. We have the best terroir for nutritious vegetation and we are
The point is this: if we want better health, we don’t need a detox or some other Tik Tok fad. We simple need to remember who we are: a human animal, designed for wild movement, natural rhythms, and food that didn’t come in a plastic pouch.
We don’t need a cave. We just need a bit more caveman in our days.
And if any of this rings a little too true, if you’re knackered, creaky, snacky, or just vaguely feeling unwell, drop me a line. I can help you with a proper no-nonsense reset that helps you eat, move, sleep and live the way your body’s actually built for. So you feel more feeling like yourself again.
Comentários