Evolution didn’t prepare us for city life and anthropologists say we’re paying the price

For the longest time, we human beings have been trying to attain a more luxurious lifestyle. City development has contributed ongoing efforts to build better for the upcoming decades. However, a recent study published on November 7 in the Journal of Biological Reviews revealed that humans are not built to live in this setup. Dr Danny Longman, Senior Lecturer in Human Evolutionary Physiology at Loughborough University, and Colin Shaw, a researcher from the University of Zurich, who leads the Human Evolutionary EcoPhysiology, conducted the research to understand human scientific behavior, per Phys.org and Loughborough University. 

The researchers led with a convincing argument. Human beings have adapted to wildlife for centuries. The whole concept of survival, hunting, gathering, and so on became etched into human functioning. Dealing with this environment for years, the human body has become biologically accustomed to managing it. "In our ancestral environments, we were well adapted to deal with acute stress to evade or confront predators," Shaw explained. "The lion would come around occasionally, and you had to be ready to defend yourself — or run. The key is that the lion goes away again,” he added. However, the trending way of life — the modernism of cities and the contemporary living is stressing human beings out more than ever. 

“For most of human history, our biology was shaped by natural environments, but industrialization has rapidly transformed the world around us — faster than our bodies can adapt,” Longman said, per Newsweek. The research suggests that because our ancestry has long been on the natural side, the buildings, stressors, work, and industrial lifestyle are taking a toll on us. Longman pointed out that when these stressful situations are witnessed by us, however different they may be, we respond with the same mindset of having to deal with the lion. 

"Our body reacts as though all these stressors were lions. Whether it's a difficult discussion with your boss or traffic noise, your stress response system is still the same as if you were facing lion after lion. As a result, you have a very powerful response from your nervous system, but no recovery,” he explained. Things like “day-to-day, chronic background noise, crowds, traffic, digital overstimulation and limited access to natural spaces” were not designed for us in the first place. Longman noted that due to this our stressors are always “switched on” causing “anxiety, cardiovascular strain, cognitive impairment, immune dysregulation and reduced reproductive health,” among others. 

Due to this burnout, we’re struggling in the very landscape we built for ourselves. So what’s the solution? Instead of looking at and hearing nature pictures or sounds, we need to prioritize living with it. “Our findings highlight that exposure to natural environments is not a luxury — it’s a biological necessity. The more we separate ourselves from nature, the more we risk undermining the fundamental systems that keep us healthy, resilient, and capable of long-term survival,” Shaw noted. He urged the need to “rethink” our relationship with nature and not be so bent on living in a sculpted world. “Urban living is our future. The challenge is to design cities that work with human biology, not against it,” he added.

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