Thank you for this fascinating and critically important question. Answers to it might help us re-include regular physical activity into our collective lifestyles.

The reason we chose a sedentary lifestyle may simply be "because we can". Biology is hardwired to conserve energy and optimize efficiency. This includes humans. Every labor-saving "advance" in the history of humanity also constitutes another setback to the impetus for activity. Why hunt and gather if you can produce more food per unit energy by domesticating animals and farming? Why walk or run anywhere when you can get there faster with less metabolic energy in a motorized vehicle? Why type when you can communicate faster and with less energy using computerized voice recognition, as I'm doing right now? This process continues to the point that the modern office workplace may be considered an occupational hazard by virtue of the imposed inactivity. (SeeConference Paper Should We Treat Workplace Inactivity like Occupational Hazar...

Let's hope that if we're smart enough to recognize how technological advance has allowed a sedentary and unhealthy lifestyle, we're also smart enough to re-incorporate healthy activity into our lifestyle. The good news may be that we can move for fun instead of by necessity. Thanks again for this interesting and important question.

Excellent comments Donald. One of my side jobs is as Health & Safety Representative in my university. All UK university H&S reps are now looking into inactivity and the risks of sedentary jobs.

Dear Barry Turner,

"All UK university H&S reps are now looking into inactivity and the risks of sedentary jobs"

However, the British need first of all to give up their favorite bacon in the morning as a high-calorie breakfast. It is believed that processed red meat causes significant harm to the body. By the way, in the era of the coronavirus, there are urgent recommendations to lose a lot of weight, since being overweight is a gift for the coronavirus so that a person gets sick quickly. Observations show that many respectable people have lost a lot of weight and even rejuvenated following this recommendation. Health is influenced primarily by a healthy lifestyle and, above all, by a healthy diet. However, if you have a healthy and active lifestyle, but at the same time have stressful situations, this will nullify all the achievements. It is known that for the coronavirus, stress is the best gift, since a person's immunity drops dramatically. However, it is in the era of the coronavirus that it is recommended to stay at home and avoid external contacts without special need, which does not contribute to active movement. However, there is an opportunity to do active gymnastics at home and this is a good compensation. Therefore, the solution to the problem must be sought in a complex where active movements of the human body play their own, but far from decisive, role. So, healthy eating + active hobby (it is better if this hobby pays well) - these are the main components of maintaining health.

It is possible that I am greatly mistaken.

Gennady Fedulov

Dr. Fedulov, thanks for your insights. I concur with many of your comments concerning health risks and the pandemic. However, I respectfully disagree with some of your more fundamental points. First, please consider that it may not be necessary for people "first of all to give up their favorite bacon" before implementing other lifestyle improvements. Benefits of increased activity, increased sleep, etc. do not depend on dietary changes. Also, telling people to give up the goodies before making other changes may disincentivize any change.

Second, to say that "Health is influenced primarily by a healthy lifestyle and, above all, by a healthy diet" ignores a large body of literature that suggests physical activity and adequate, healthy sleep are each at least as important as diet, if not moreso. Not that these three pillars of physical health need to compete, which is essentially my main point. This article speaks to these ideas: Article The Role of Sleep Dysfunction in Physical Inactivity and its...

Thanks again for your thoughts and for your patience with mine.

I love and share your final thought: it is possible that I too am greatly mistaken!

In terms of healthy lifestyles that of the hunter-gatherer seems perfect. Plenty of exercise, natural unprocessed food and without a 'timetable' life they must have got a good nights sleep.

Archaeology has however shown that they were riddled with arthritis much earlier than we are today and prone to lots of very bad parasitic infections. A relatively minot accident meant you were no longer productive and by all accounts there lives were in the words of Hobbes nasty, brutish and short.

The early agriculturalists did not fare much better. Those skeletons show massive trauma injury and spinal problems. A failed crop meant starvation.

Still not certain why humans made the choice in such a short space of time is=n so many different places.

I would like to answer this question from a nutritional neuroscience perspective. The type of food we consume impacts our brain chemistry. Contemporary food causes fluctuations in blood sugar. The dips trigger the conversion of dopamine ( the motivation neurotransmitter) into norepinephrine and epinephrine ( the stress chemicals) to restore blood sugar. Therefore, we move from a motivation state to a stressful one. Stress is typically associated with unhealthy eating , which makes people enter a vicious cycle of eating and not moving.

Dear Lina Begdache,

I fully support your opinion, especially since this opinion comes from your personal page as a phrase "... brain morphology and brain development vs maintenance and repair may require a different repertoire of food and environmental factors". Thus, if I'm understanding everything correctly, the factors of human health are ordered in sequence:

1. Nutrition.

2. Ecology.

3. Lifestyle.

If you only follow the lifestyle along with all kinds of vigorous activity, and at the same time ignore "Nutrition" and "Environment", this lifestyle will be nullified. Therefore, this must be borne in mind when only the factor of "vigorous activity" is pursued. Apparently I didn’t consider a few more factors that could be ahead of the “factor of vigorous activity” (for example, interesting and exciting work as a good relaxation for the brain and others), and then it can turn out that “factor of vigorous activity” would be in tenth place or even further. As the medical saying goes, "it is not the disease that needs to be treated, but the patient" taking into account all the factors.

Maybe, my answer will be a bit far from nutritional and other theories, however I think, the harsh condition of live 11,000 years ago ( or in pre-historical/ historical periods) and since people are social creatures, by the nature, may explain a chose for a sedentary lifestyle. Today, we can observe the reverse direction of our society where segregation, separation and alienation are the main and common aspects of contemporary life. Where all this theories about stoicism and libertarianism come from?

Whole universe is moving in a circular manner. I believe that journey of civilization will take all of us again to hunter and gatherer stage.

In the past, many thousands of years ago, our ancestors were mostly nomadic. The next stage was the sedentary lifestyle, when man learned to grow plants and raise livestock. Agriculture has been a key factor in converting from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary one. Subsequently, the development of craftsmanship and manufacturing involving the creation of various tools of useful agricultural and other tools contributed to the sedentary mode. Currently, sedentary mode continues, for example in connection with working at the computer. However, in a situation where we work for many hours in a sedentary mode, it is important to also carry out physical activity as a break from work, as a hobby, etc. This issue is important for health.

Best regards,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

I am disagree with you, since many nations, such as Mongols ,Gypsies , African Bushmen etc. are very distant from agriculture, however they have accepted the sedentary lifestyle, in order to preserve their life, culture and language, so not willingly chosen. ( the Opium war between China and Great Britain can be as well an example: the weak state always concede ). It is significant being up with the time and progress, grow and succeed as a country, nation and individual

I am inclined to link our ancestor's "choice" of a sedentary lifestyle to what Harris (1990) termed "cultural takeoff". About 45,000–35,000 years ago, cultural selection, that is, the mimetic transmission of a beneficial trait or ability, began to serve as a proxy for natural selection in many if not most dimensions of the social lives of genetically modern human beings. The "cultural takeoff" that Harris (1990) discerned was almost certainly sparked by linguistic development. With speech (viz., vocal communication using language), community-based negotiation, customs, rules, decision-making, planning, and execution became possible (Axelrod, 1984). At long last, with the appearance of writing systems in Mesopotamia (ca. 3400–3200 BCE), Egypt (ca. 3200 BCE), the Indus region (ca. 2600–1700 BCE), China (ca. 1200 BCE), and Mesoamerica (ca. 900–600 BCE), our ancestors established the means for increasingly coordinated and extended action across larger groups of people, which sped the transition from hunter–gatherer to agricultural societies (Harris, 2013). Of course, here and there, nomadic lifestyles perdure.

References

Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Harris, M. (1990). Our Kind: Who we are, where we came from, where we are going. New York, NY: HarperCollins/Harper Perennial.

Harris, R. (2013). The origin of writing. London: UK: Bloomsbury Publishing.

The new study by Thomas Cucchi, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen in the UK, used a house mouse to monitor a process of hunter-gathering to sedentary life https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/when-did-humans-settle-down-house-mouse-may-have-answer

Lisa Maher, an anthropologist of the University of California, Berkeley, who studies hunter-gatherer societies, mentions that sedentarism and agriculture are separate things, each with their own timeline and trajectory of development

(A) What pressures and influences initiated this drastic change in individual and group behaviour, and (B) why had it not happened before?

(B) In my book "Subsurface History of Humanity: Direction of History," I found that there were 26 great opportunities created by humankind for itself during humankind's history. One of them is "Domesticated plants and animals." The rate of creation of those great opportunities was very uneven in humankind's history. From 44000 BC to the beginning of Holocene, only three such opportunities were created. At 10500 BC, at the dawn of the Holocene, the first cows were domesticated. Then, in Holocene, 22 great opportunities were created. The comfortable and very stable climate in Holocene was the initial cause for a change in the driving force for humankind and, therefore, for the rate of humankind development in Holocene. I hypothesized in my articles and my book that in Holocene, with its stable and suitable for humans climate, the change in humankind population became a new driving force for humanity's development

(A) During the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture-induced sedentary lifestyle, different processes happen. In some regions, the change in population has led to the transition to the use of domesticated animals and plants. In other regions, the transition to the use of domesticated animals and plants led to population growth in settlements.

I think that one of the root causes of why settlements won over hunter-gatherers is the brutality of human competition. Different bands of humans were fighting and killing each other all the time. One result of the population growth in settlements was that settlements could provide more fighters than bands of hunter-gatherers. After that trend started to appear, hunter-gatherers did not stand a chance.

I am agree, that being as a group, may solve many issues and be a practical way to survive or to withstand natural disasters, flood, famine etc.

An extension of material and provisional interchange (goods and food), would lead to a cultural and economic interdependence, thus would be also a corresponding point.

Then, water supply as a primary resource for animals and people may be an unifying element and, therefore an impetus for sedentary life.

And , of course, if one particular land may provide with everything what people (a tribe/clan) need and meet their demands, can be another point.

Also the emergence of the stone and later iron ages transformed people's life perspectives

• Thank you for this very important and fascinating question. It can be said that this is a question for which a single answer cannot be given, which means that several factors may have been influential in changing the mobile lifestyle to sedentary. Among other things, it can be said that one of the factors that led to the choice of this lifestyle, the improvement of climatic conditions, and perhaps most importantly, the increase in human population can be considered as the most important factors. It should be noted, however, that the mobile lifestyle has made food supply difficult in some seasons, and humans have chosen agriculture and sedentary to access food in harsh conditions such as winter. And even hunting animals was sometimes difficult. Humans were freed from the domination of environmental change by domestication and provided food more easily, although agriculture was a very difficult activity in the Neolithic period.
• In general, it can be said that in most cases, external factors and pressure cause changes, for example, today increase in population, and the reduction of resources and the destruction of nature that we see today and in the future it will be impossible to live on Earth, Makes humans seek out signs of life on other planets to inhabit.

Early humans started walking to avoid predators and look for food. Once those tasks were secured, it was time to rest, perform art and science to make tasks easier.

However, if you rest for too long, your body will be unable to walk again to perform additional tasks.

Many scholars have agreed that the discovery of agriculture is the number factor that converted man from his hunter gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary one, though dates and place it began are not clear. The reason why it took so long for early man to be able to develop agricultural practices could be due to the fact that the mental development was poor for man to be able to figure out the possibility of a sedentary life. Until man's cranial capacity upgraded to a level of discernment, he couldn't develop a sedentary lifestyle.