I am slowly listening to the audiobook Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harris and damn, it is all kinds of fascinating. In fact, I really want to be listening to it RIGHT NOW but I have a window available for writing, so I am going to seize it while I can.

This is the thing I have learned from Sapiens that I really want to drill into my head: I am a cavewoman living in the 21st century.

Okay, okay, I am not actually living in a cave. (THANK GOD.) But from an evolutionary perspective, I am no different from my ancestors who shivered in caves 200,000 years ago. Humanity has come a long way since the days of wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers, but evolution is slow. We have the same bodies, brains and biology as the Homo Sapiens who walked the earth many, many millennia ago.

The reason we now build skyscrapers and send people into space is not because of any evolutionary changes. It’s because of our magnificent imaginations.

But I’m not writing about humankind’s imagination today. I want to focus on my inner cavewoman.

In the not so distant past, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. The agricultural revolution happened 10,000 years ago but Homo Sapiens first appeared at least 200,000 years ago. Math is not my super power, but even I can tell you that for most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers. Farming is a very, very new innovation.

As hunter-gatherers, we had to eat what was available. If a cavewoman walked past a ripe fig tree, she did not pluck off a single fig, savor it’s flavor, and plan to come back tomorrow. Tomorrow was too late. By tomorrow, the local baboons would have stripped the tree bare! No, if a cavewoman walked past a ripe fig tree, she went into feeding frenzy mode and ate as many figs as possible. Then she carried home as many as she could.

The cavewoman was biologically programmed to EAT ALL THE FIGS because the figs were rarely available. And we still carry in our DNA the biological imperative to EAT ALL THE FIGS because 200,000 years is barely a minute from an evolutionary perspective.

Now let’s imagine my inner cavewoman at the grocery store:

Shit is about to go down. My inner cavewoman is seconds away from ripping open packages and gobbling up cookies, candies, and just about anything with the scent of sugar. Then she is going to guzzle soda until she is sick. When security tries to stop her, she will go into Saber Tooth Mode until everyone flees the store. She will barricade herself inside and refuse to leave voluntarily until she has eaten All The Sugar.

But I don’t go into Saber Tooth Mode when I go to the grocery store. I am actually going to the grocery store this afternoon and I am 99.999999% confident that I”ll be able to stroll down the aisles without tearing open bags of sugary treats. I have an inner cavewoman but she does not completely control me.

Yet she does heavily influence my relationship with food. I’ll write more about that tomorrow…