How Did Ancient Humans Kill Anxiety?

You woke up today and felt afraid. You did not know why. It was not a tiger. It was not a famine. It was not a man with a knife at your village. It was nothing. Just the feeling. A weight in your chest before your eyes opened. You think this is who you are. It is not. You inherited the alarm. But the people who built it would not recognize the way you live with it. For most of the time humans have existed, this feeling — this background dread you wake up with — did not exist. The alarm worked the way it was designed to work. It fired when there was something to fear, and it shut off when there was not. This is the story of how ancient humans killed anxiety. And why we cannot. In 2017, Herman Pontzer at Duke put cortisol patches on the Hadza of Tanzania. Their cortisol curve was real — and it bottomed out at sunset and stayed there for twelve hours. The American adult's never does. In 1977, Daniel Everett moved his family into the Brazilian Amazon to live with the Pirahã. He stayed thirty years. He did not see one case of generalized anxiety. He did not see suicide. He did not see one Pirahã lie awake at three in the morning, terrified of nothing. They had three things you do not have. Sundown. Fire. Each other. The machine that shut the alarm off worked for two hundred thousand years. About seventy years ago, we broke it. You are not anxious because you are weak. You are anxious because you are the first generation in the history of the species to be raised without fire, without sundown, and without a tribe. You woke up afraid this morning. You did not have to. ⏱ Chapters 0:00 You Woke Up Afraid 0:25 The Background Dread 1:00 The Hadza & Pontzer 2017 2:30 The Pirahã & Daniel Everett 3:45 The Three Things They Had 4:00 Sundown 4:45 Fire As Therapy 5:45 Five Hours of Touch 6:30 We Broke The Machine 7:15 You Are Not Broken 7:50 You Did Not Have To 🔔 Subscribe for more videos on how ancient humans lived. #AncientHumans #Anxiety #Hadza #Pirahã #Anthropology #HumanEvolution #MentalHealth #HunterGatherer #Stress #Cortisol