A new paper by evolutionary anthropologists Colin Shaw (University of Zurich) and Daniel Longman (Loughborough University) argues that modern life has outpaced human evolution. The study suggests that chronic stress and many modern health issues are the result of an evolutionary mismatch between our primarily nature-adapted biology and the industrialized environments we now inhabit.

The paper is published in the journal Biological Reviews.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, humans adapted to the demands of hunter-gatherer life—high mobility, intermittent stress and close interaction with natural surroundings. Industrialization, by contrast, has transformed the human environment in only a few centuries, by introducing noise, air and light pollution, microplastics, pesticides, constant sensory stimulation, artificial light, processed foods and sedentary lifestyles.

"In our ancestral environments, we were well adapted to deal with acute stress to evade or confront predators," explains Colin Shaw, who leads the Human Evolutionary EcoPhysiology (HEEP) research group together with Daniel Longman.

"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."

Today's stressors—traffic, work demands, social media and noise, to name just a few—trigger the same biological systems, but without resolution or recovery. "Our body reacts as though all these stressors were lions," says Longman.

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