Lessons from the Paleolithic Era for Contemporary Urbanites

Gustav Milne sets the stage for tough talk in an article for The Guardian Cities:

However “civilised” we may now consider ourselves to be, biologically we are much closer to our stone age ancestors. There is a major mismatch between our modern urbanised world and our “paleolithic genome”, the genetic material encoded in our DNA, which supports an ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The central conceit of Milne's argument is that urbanization is bad for humans—as evidenced by the scourges of "scurvy, rickets, osteomalacia, Reiter’s syndrome, gout, ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, septic arthritis, tuberculosis, osteitis, poliomyelitis and leprosy" when the Romans introduced Britain to town life 2,000 years ago. Now it's "obesity, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure and various cancers" that kill urban populations.

The remedy of the maladies of urban living, according to Milne, can be found in a return to the Paleolithic past. The article lists several categories of actions that can improve the health of urban dwellers, from matters of physiology, crime, and planning for evolution.