The Ancestral Playbook: How to Live Like a Human in the 21st Century

A doctor’s step-by-step guide to aligning your biology with reality

Modern life has turned us into the sickest, weakest, most overfed and undernourished humans in history. Chronic disease is now normalised. Kids are developing obesity and fatty liver before they’ve even hit puberty. Adults are living longer (though, that statistic is rapidly changing, and lifespan is starting to decrease in the West), but not healthier. The “healthcare” system is drowning because it’s treating mismatch diseases with pills instead of addressing the root cause.

Here’s the truth: your biology hasn’t changed. You are still the same Homo sapiens that stepped into the world over 300,000 years ago. What’s changed is the environment you live in. Evolution built you for one setting, but you’re stuck in another. The result? Disease, fatigue, obesity.

The fix, unsurprisingly, is not complicated: live in line with the conditions your body expects. That’s what this playbook is about.

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1. Why Ancestral Still Matters

Paleoanthropology is clear: humans evolved under the same consistent pressures for millions of years. Food wasn’t a mystery. Light wasn’t optional. Movement wasn’t something you had to schedule or think about — it was expected and necessary.

Now, we live in artificial light, with processed food, sedentary jobs, constant toxins, and 24/7 stress. None of this existed even just a few hundred years ago. Every chronic disease we see exploding today can be explained by a mismatch between what your biology expects, and what it gets.