alt text
First panel: [blank white space with black text] Jogging from the perspective of animals
Second panel: Wolf by a tree looking at a man jogging. "What are you running from, apex predator"
Third panel: Wolf: "Are you chasing prey?" "You need to conserve energy"
Last panel: [second wolf peeking in] "The hell is that guy doing" [first wolf] "I don't know. I don't understand"
(alt text by @cypnk@mastodon.social)
We've become so successful at getting food, we don't have to move much to do it any more. So we have to go out of our way to be active to stay healthy since evolution takes so long to catch up.
I've got my money on that not happening until after an apocalyptic event sends us back to the iron age. And the adaptations we're gonna get aren't gonna be pretty.
Unless we get fucked spectacularly we probably wont devolve back to the iron age. At worst maybe the age of sails but even then it'd be rather scattershot on what tech would survive. You might have a scenario where most tech is at 1700s level but with radio and modern firearms or atleast ww1-gulf war level.
With the level of technical knowledge we've achieved, there's no way we're going back to doing things exactly the way they used to. One example that jumps out at me is the method this primitive technology guy on youtube uses to stoke his furnace. He's basically made a little manual turbine out of leaves and vines to push his air rather than one of those little squeeze box things.
Obviously I'm not a blacksmith or historian so I don't actually know how common something like that might have been, but I'm guessing it's not super old. In any case, I'm sure there are other ways that we'd apply our more advanced knowledge to tackling the sorts of problems we'd be looking at with a collapse of manufacturing and shipping infrastructure.
Honestly, a technologically adept but non-industrial society of artisans sounds kind of cool.