Lest We Forget The Great Forgetting And It’s Influence On Our Lives And Training

Hi folks,

I have seen the Milky Way in all of its beauty, our Galaxy from Earth, only a few times due to light pollution.

There is a tendency to think that people thousands of years ago were primitive, not as ‘civilized’ as we are today. Forget that! They didn’t have iPods or worry about their blogging ideas, but they could see the planets and the stars way more clearly than most of us ever will. Can you imagine this planet without electric light pollution? I can’t, but I am sure that it was a different world to the one we experience today. However, our genomes (sum total of our genetic record) and memomes (sum total of our behaviors, habits, and stories) do not change so fast as we would like to think. This kind of thinking is the source of the paleolithic diet approach to nutrition, though finding equivalent foods is probably almost impossible.

The Story of B putting 'civilization' in perspective for FitOldDog.

My first encounter with ‘The Great Forgetting‘ was in the book ‘The Story of B,’ which I found to be quite enlightening. It made me realize that the two million years prior to the onset of ‘civilization’ 20-40 thousand years ago, still plays a major role in our metabolism, thinking and belief systems (some of which appear to be hard-wired).

“It was paleontology that exposed The Great Forgetting. It did so by making it unarguably clear that humans had been around long, long before any conceivable date for the planting of the first crop and the beginning of civilization.” Quote from David Sheen.

I was reminded of this whilst admiring the vegetation that we had purchased for our yard, which included flowering plants for decoration, vegetables and fruits (tomatoes) to eat, and herbs to flavor our food and perhaps add essential minerals and vitamins that we need but don’t know that we need. Such an array of plants took my mind back to the origin of life on earth, about which we can only speculate in an informed kind of way.

Spring is a time for planting!

We seem to be stuck with the issue of making fat from sugar but not sugar from fat because of a quirk of the carbon count as the Kreb’s cycle evolved. These things became locked in a billion or more years ago, but the Great Forgetting is about our story as humans, in the more recent couple of million years or so. I often try to imagine what it was like for such people, and people they were, as they struggled to make sense of the universe, the heavens, and the fact that they had to somehow rear their slowly-maturing young in a hostile world.

I wrote this post to encourage people to reflect about such things, as they define whom they are, how they work physically and mentally, and why they behave as they do. Such understanding leads to questioning which can result in progress in every aspect of our lives, including safe exercise for better health.

When did humans first think to cultivate plants? Long before they built houses and armies, I suspect.

-k @FitOldDog

Keywords: blogging ideas, safe exercise,

Today’s workouts:

Workout PLAN Coach: Chris Hauth

Run

Distance: 10.0 mi Duration: 01:15:00

Description: 10 miles aerobic – zone 2