The Human Body is Not Made to Walk on Concrete

Where do we come from? In its simplest form the question is one of either evolution or creation. For this story it makes no difference, because the story is only a few hundred generations old.

Growing up, I was taught the theory of evolution. That we crawled out of the primordial soup and eventually walked the earth. I don’t believe that, at least not in the context of the last few hundred generations.

When I look at fossils of humans and mummified remains from the last seven thousand to three million years, I believe I am looking at something that has barely evolved at all. I believe that the only difference between man today and man thousands of generations ago is that we are bigger, bigger because we have better nutrition and no longer need to hunt and gather our food. In my mind that goes a lot farther to explain the last few thousand generations than the idea that we evolved from apes. It is hard to have perspective when the timeframe has all those zeros.

The central point of how we have evolved is taking place right now, under our feet. Concrete is not a natural phenomenon. We are only the third and fourth generations to walk exclusively on concrete and I believe that this is the major force affecting the evolution of modern man. Man has walked the earth for thousands of generations, and it was not until we invented the automobile in 1897 that we had a use for concrete and started paving everything. Therefore, your great-great grandparents never stepped on concrete, and you and I practically never step off of it. For all intents and purposes, the world we live in is hard and flat. The major evolutionary force of the last few hundred generations is concrete and the way we walk on it.

Think about it from this standpoint. Man has walked the earth for arguably millions of years and, in a time that happens to be greater than our lifetimes, a fundamental and revolutionary change has occurred. It is because this length of time is greater than our own lifetimes that we did not appreciate its significance on “modern man,” especially because it coincides with the age of enlightenment in medicine.