The people who never stopped

In the forest of eastern Paraguay, a group of Aché men sets off at first light to hunt. They carry bows and not much else. They will track through the forest on foot for most of the day, and walk home with whatever they find. Nobody has a plan written down, and nobody is wearing anything made for exercise.

When anthropologists followed Aché men on their forest trips, they found the men spent almost seven hours a day getting food. By the evening, each of them had done more than most of us do in a week.

01

They have none of what we buy.

Think of what we have built to help us move. Gyms full of machines. Treadmills that let you run without going anywhere. Roads paved smooth and flat, and running shoes designed for them. Compression clothes, training plans, sports drinks.

The Aché had their legs, the forest floor and a bow. None of it was training. It was just their day.

02

Fit at every age.

Researchers measured the strength and physical performance of almost every Aché over the age of ten. The men peaked in their early twenties and then declined only slowly. The women's performance barely declined with age at all, so that older men and women ended up close together. Nobody in an Aché family needed a reason to move, a membership or the right clothes. Moving was simply what people did, at every age.

03

When the machines came, the fitness went.

On the other side of the world, in the Canadian Arctic, the Inuit of Igloolik once travelled their land on foot, often through deep snow. Then snowmobiles arrived. Researchers happened to test the fitness of most of the community twice, ten years apart. In that decade, their aerobic fitness fell by about 15 percent, and their legs grew weaker. The researchers linked it to riding machines instead of walking through snow, though diet and daily life changed too.

It took one machine, and one decade. The gear did not make them fitter. It took the movement out of their day, and their bodies let go of what they no longer used.

A snowmobile pulls a loaded wooden sled across rough sea ice on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. One rider sits on the machine. — Winter travel by snowmobile, Baffin Island, Nunavut, 1997. Photo: Ansgar Walk, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.

04

And many of them are happy.

Most people who still live close to the land own very little. In a survey of nearly 3,000 people in Indigenous and local communities around the world, most earned less than 1,000 dollars a year. They still rated their lives 6.8 out of 10 on average, and four of the communities scored above 8, as high as people in the richest countries.

We cannot say that movement made them happy. We can say that they did not need what we buy to be happy, or to be fit.

A scatter chart of life satisfaction against yearly income per person. The orange dots are small communities living close to the land. They earn almost no money, yet score from about 5 to 8.6 out of 10. That is as high as the richest countries, the blue dots, whose incomes reach over 100,000 dollars. — Life satisfaction and income in small communities (orange) and whole countries (blue). From Galbraith et al., PNAS 2024, CC BY 4.0.

05

We have everything, and we are not well.

Now look at our side. We have the gyms, the shoes and the smooth roads, and a great many of us are struggling. More than 300 million people live with depression, and more than 400 million with an anxiety disorder. One adult in six is living with obesity. Low back pain troubles 619 million people, and it is the leading cause of disability on Earth. Operations to fuse the bones of the lower back have become common across the West. In about a decade, they rose by more than 60 percent in both the United Kingdom and the United States, and in Australia they more than doubled.

Movement is not the whole story behind any of this. Diet, stress, money, genes and age all play their part. But movement is part of it. Across studies of nearly 200,000 people, adults who got the recommended amount of activity had about a quarter less risk of depression. For people who already have it, trials find exercise works about as well as talking therapy or antidepressants. And for most long-lasting back pain, the first treatment doctors recommend is exercise.

A world map shaded by how common low back pain is, after adjusting for age, in 2020. The darkest countries include the United States, Australia, Russia and much of Europe, while China, India and much of Africa are lighter. — How common low back pain was in each country in 2020, adjusted for age. From GBD 2021 Low Back Pain Collaborators, The Lancet Rheumatology 2023, CC BY 4.0.

What this means for you

Nobody is asking you to move to the forest and hunt with a bow. The point is what these lives show. Our species got fit and stayed fit with a body, the ground under it and the simplest tools. Everything we have added since is optional, and some of it, like the Inuit snowmobile, takes more than it gives.

So do not wait for the right gym, the right shoes or the right kit. You do not need any of it. Your body and the simplest things are enough: a path, a hill, a lake, something heavy to carry. With those, you can be incredibly fit, and happy, through movement.

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