Coping with civilisation

Although homo sapiens as a species has been in it's current form for perhaps 200,000 years, we've only very recently, in evolutionary terms, had to start coping with modern inventions like civilisation and agriculture. It struck me on the underground in London yesterday that I was surrounded by people whose bodies had evolved to be suited to hunting and gathering on the African savanna in small nomadic groups of perhaps 150. Yet there were more people than that crammed in upright as tight as sardines in a rickety tin box hurtling beneath the streets of London. And bizarrely enough, no one was trying to kill anyone else. It sometimes amazes me how flexible we human beings must be to be able to cope with such rapidly changing environments. Although the 10,000 odd years since the dawn of agriculture and civilisation may be a long time in historical terms, it's the blink of an eye as far as evolution is concerned. We've not had time for our bodies to adapt to things like agrarian diets, or sitting in office cubicles, and yet somehow we manage!

And yet, sometimes I wonder if perhaps our entire race is still processing what must have been a profoundly psychologically traumatic circumstance of the change from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society.

(The artwork is by Banksy, a very interesting British grafitti artist.)