The people who never stopped

It is early morning in the dry bush of northern Tanzania, and a group of Hadza women is leaving camp. Some carry babies on their backs. Each has a digging stick, and not much else. They will walk for hours, dig for roots in the hard ground, pick berries, and carry what they find back to camp. The men have already gone the other way with their bows. Nobody has a plan written down, and nobody is wearing anything made for exercise.

By the evening, every one of them will have done more than most of us do in a week.

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 Hadza have their legs, the ground and a few simple tools. Researchers fitted 177 Hadza adults with movement trackers. The women averaged about 14,000 steps a day and the men about 16,000, with close to three hours of brisk activity. People over 70 still averaged about 10,000 steps.

In the Bolivian Amazon, the Tsimané fish, hunt and farm small forest plots, and they tell the same story. The men are active for six to seven hours a day and the women for four to six. They spend less than a tenth of their daylight hours sitting. In rich countries, adults spend more than half of their waking hours that way.

None of it is training. It is just their day.

And they are in great shape.

When doctors scanned the hearts of more than 700 Tsimané adults, 85 percent had no hardening of the arteries at all. It is the healthiest set of hearts ever recorded in any population. Their blood pressure barely rises with age.

The researchers credit their diet and lean bodies as well as their activity, not movement alone. These are hard lives, with real disease and real loss, and nobody has run the experiment that would prove what does what. But the Tsimané have never owned a piece of fitness equipment, and their hearts are in better shape than ours.

And many of them are happy.

Most of these people 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. One small study compared the Hadza with people in Poland. The Hadza were the happier of the two, and unlike the Poles, they did not grow less happy with age.

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.

Everyone moves, at every age.

In these communities, nobody is too young or too old to move. Hadza children between five and 14 go out foraging and bring back more food than the trip costs them. Among Tsimané children and young people, seven in ten get the hour of daily activity that health guidelines recommend. Across the world, more than eight in ten teenagers fall short of it. And the Hadza over 70 are still out walking every day.

Nobody in these families needs a reason to move, or a membership, or the right clothes. Moving is simply what people do together.

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. In the United States, operations to fuse the bones of the lower back rose by more than 60 percent in about a decade, to nearly 200,000 a year.

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. And for most long-lasting back pain, the first treatment doctors recommend is exercise.

We built everything to make movement easier, and then most of us stopped moving.

What this means for you

Nobody is asking you to move to the bush and dig for roots. The point is what their life shows. 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.

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.

Sources

Sayre et al. 2023. American Journal of Biological Anthropology 182:340-356. Hadza steps and activity, including the over-70s.
Marlowe 2010. The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania. University of California Press. How Hadza women and men forage.
Kaplan et al. 2017. The Lancet 389:1730-1739. Tsimané hearts and daily activity.
Gurven et al. 2012. Hypertension 60:25-33. Tsimané blood pressure.
Gurven et al. 2013. PLoS ONE 8:e55679. Tsimané activity, and why it is not the whole story.
Galbraith et al. 2024. PNAS 121:e2311703121. Life satisfaction in low-income communities.
Frackowiak et al. 2020. Frontiers in Psychology 11:1173. Happiness among the Hadza and in Poland.
Froehle et al. 2019. American Journal of Human Biology 31:e23209. Hadza children foraging.
Caldwell et al. 2023. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 290:20231764. Activity in Tsimané young people.
Guthold et al. 2018. The Lancet Global Health 6:e1077-e1086. Too little activity worldwide.
World Health Organization 2025. Fact sheets on depression and on mental disorders.
World Health Organization 2024. Fact sheet on obesity and overweight.
GBD 2021 Low Back Pain Collaborators 2023. The Lancet Rheumatology 5:e316-e329. Low back pain worldwide.
Martin et al. 2019. Spine 44:369-376. Lumbar fusion in the United States, 2004 to 2015.
Pearce et al. 2022. JAMA Psychiatry 79:550-559. Physical activity and the risk of depression.
Foster et al. 2018. The Lancet 391:2368-2383. Treatment guidelines for low back pain.