The Paleo Manifesto

What if the key to modern health lies not in pills or willpower, but in understanding what kind of animal you are? John Durant’s book argues that to fix modern sickness, you must treat humans the same way zookeepers treat animals: as a species defined by its evolutionary habitat. From zoo science to personal experimentation, he weaves biology, history, and culture into a single principle: know thy species.

The Biological Premise

Durant begins with a deceptively simple insight borrowed from Dr. Jonas Salk: every species thrives best in the environment it evolved to live in. Health problems arise when a creature’s current habitat diverges from its ancestral one. The story of Mokolo and Bebac—the Cleveland Zoo gorillas who grew obese and anxious on processed pellets until switched to natural produce—serves as metaphor and proof. Once fed vegetables resembling their wild diet, they lost weight, calmed down, and regained vitality. You, Durant suggests, are no different. You inhabit an engineered zoo of offices, apartments, and screens—and your ailments reflect it.

Evolution as a Diagnostic Lens

The book tracks your lineage back to the Paleolithic, when human bodies evolved under open skies, variable diets, and diverse physical movement. At the Peabody Museum, skulls like Skhul V show signs of robust health—wide jaws, straight teeth, thick bones—contrasting sharply with those of later agricultural people with cavities and weaker skeletons. By studying early humans, Durant recovers constants of human adaptation: natural light, omnivorous diet, physical variety, communal living, and regular exposure to nature’s stressors—heat, cold, fasting, and exertion.

Culture as Fast Adaptation

When genes can’t keep pace, culture steps in. Durant’s chapter on Moses shows that ancient ritual laws served as a kind of epidemiology: quarantine, washing, burning, and burial protocols preserved tribes from the new diseases of agriculture. Similarly, industrial society reinvented hygiene—limes cured scurvy, vitamins cured rickets—but at the cost of new chronic mismatches: processed foods, artificial light, mechanized inactivity. Culture solves some problems yet generates others; your task is to align modern tools with ancient biology.

Technology, Data, and Experimentation

Durant doesn’t reject progress—he repurposes it. The Information Age allows you to measure physiology with unprecedented precision. He praises the biohacker ethos: test, record, and share. Whether tracking sleep rhythms or experimenting with intermittent fasting, you can use your own body as a small laboratory. But he warns against arrogance: evolution sets the ground rules, and personal tinkering must respect them. (Note: Durant cites Art De Vany, Mark Sisson, and the Quantified Self movement as practical exemplars.)

From Diagnosis to Design: Building Human Habitats

Durant ends where he started—with habitat design. Just as modern zoos replaced cages with naturalistic landscapes, humans must redesign cities, homes, and routines to elicit healthier behavior automatically. Standing desks, communal training grounds, and rituals of heat, cold, fasting, and play rebuild the environments that shaped human physiology. This is not nostalgia; it’s applied ecology. The goal is not to return to caves but to use design so that the modern environment speaks the language your biology understands.

“A species is best understood by the habitat it evolved to live in.”

Durant’s thesis reframes health as ecological design: understand your ancestral wiring, and build modern ecosystems that let it function properly.

In Durant’s synthesis, modern health science, history, and anthropology converge. Whether through movement, light, food, or ritual, the task is the same: bridge the gap between the world you evolved for and the one you inhabit now. Health becomes not a project of discipline, but of intelligent design.

Durant anchors his practical philosophy in evolutionary biology. The body you inhabit today is the product of millions of years of environmental pressure shaping diet, movement, and sleep. To act wisely in modern life, you must first know the environmental constants that trained human physiology to thrive.

Ancestral Evidence and the Diet Spectrum

By examining fossils from places like Olduvai Gorge or skulls such as Skhul V, anthropology reveals that pre-agricultural humans were both omnivorous and physically robust. Dr. Daniel Lieberman’s comparative skulls show wide jaws and good dentition—signals of tougher, minimally processed food. The Agricultural Revolution replaced diverse hunting and gathering with grain monocultures, narrowing nutrient range and introducing new diseases. The result: smaller, sicker populations dependent on dense carbohydrates.

Cooking and Brain Evolution

Dr. Richard Wrangham’s famous hypothesis connects the mastery of fire to encephalization—the energy cost of a bigger brain was met by cooking, which pre-digests food. Durant uses this story to remind you that culture and evolution act in partnership: technological breakthroughs like cooking, tool use, or clothing reshape biology itself. It’s not nostalgia but practical anthropology—understanding what made you human outlines what still sustains you.

Evolutionary Priorities, Not Prescriptions

The takeaway is not a single diet but a diagnostic tool. There was no one “Paleo” menu; instead, evolution reveals the constants your metabolism expects—whole foods, variety, intermittent scarcity, and moderate fat and protein intake with low simple carbohydrates. You use these patterns to navigate modern confusion. Durant’s “pragmatic paleo” resembles a template, not dogma: mimic hunter-gatherer diets where sensible, and reintroduce meaningful rituals around food—broths, fermentation, seasonal cycles—that restore connection between biology and culture.

In short, understanding evolution gives you a North Star: it shows what your organs, metabolism, and brain anticipate after eons of selective pressure. Evolution tells you not what to eat this week, but what kind of environment makes you function best.

Durant translates evolutionary logic into food strategies that are both scientific and ethical. He asks you to look beyond calorie charts and morality debates, toward how biological adaptation, psychology, and technology intersect in every meal.

Industrial Mismatch and Real Food

Modern nutrition advice often mislabels the problem. “Processed” doesn’t just mean altered; it means industrial—foods stripped of their ecological signals. Grains, seed oils, and refined sugars dominate the food supply, while organs and fermentation vanish. Durant’s adaptation principles translate into four rules: mimic ancestral habits, reclaim traditional preparation methods, avoid industrial foods, and make meals meaningful. Eating organ meats or fermented vegetables, for example, reintroduces nutrients and microbes modern diets lack.

Fasting as a Biological Reset

Periodic fasting, Durant shows, activates ancient survival mechanisms: autophagy, infection resistance, and inflammation control. Religious fasting rituals—Ramadan, Yom Kippur, Lent—double as evolutionary maintenance programs. Clinical data support this: fasting before chemotherapy, for instance, lowers toxicity without reducing efficacy. The point is not asceticism but rhythm—intermittent deprivation as medicine. Durant experienced these effects during a three-day fast at the Abbey of Gethsemani, describing mental clarity and calm rather than weakness.

Ethics, Ecology, and the Vegetarian Debate

Durant treats vegetarianism not as ideology but as data. He analyzes empathy, disgust, and moralization—especially how disgust can hijack moral reasoning. Pure boycotts rarely reform industrial systems; supporting humane farms and innovation does. He points to PETA’s prize for lab-grown meat as the right direction: incentive over condemnation. The practical ethic is stewardship. Whether omnivore or vegan, the principle stays constant—use markets and culture to push food toward ecological sanity and human health.

Durant’s conclusion is pragmatic: eat like the adaptable omnivore you are, use fasting wisely, and align moral goals with incentives. Food becomes a design challenge, not an ideology.

Durant explores two invisible forces that once organized life and now silently malfunction in the modern world: light and temperature. Both act as signals—zeitgebers—that set metabolic and immune rhythms. When you ignore them, sleep, mood, and health go awry.

Sunlight and Vitamin D

Research by Dr. Michael Holick and animal anecdotes like Kimani the gorilla show that vitamin D deficiency spans species. Evolution adjusted skin tone to UV intensity, but indoor living decoupled that adaptation. Modern sunscreen once blocked UVB while allowing UVA, obscuring burn signals and increasing melanoma risk. Durant’s fix is moderation: get steady exposure without burning, supplement when geography demands, and treat sunlight as information, not enemy.

Circadian Rhythm and Sleep

Artificial light confuses your biological clock—too dim by day, too bright at night. Durant synthesizes insights from NASA sleep consultants and chronobiologists: seek bright, blue-rich light each morning, dim red light in the evening, and maintain meal and sleep regularity. Devices like f.lux are modern tools to restore ancient timing. The reward is better hormonal balance, alertness, and emotional resilience.

Thermoregulation: Embracing Heat and Cold

From Finnish saunas to polar plunges, humans have long used temperature extremes as therapy. Durant’s participation in the Coney Island Polar Bears and studies on brown adipose tissue illustrate how cold exposure builds thermogenic capacity and mood resilience. Saunas, contrast baths, and mild fever all stimulate immune function. Fever itself, he argues via Dr. Matthew Kluger’s studies, is an adaptive defense, not mere symptom—a system reboot your body often needs.

Light, dark, heat, and cold are the environmental pulses that shaped your nervous and endocrine systems. To reintroduce them intelligently is to let the world teach your body time again.

Durant’s movement philosophy moves beyond “exercise” toward behavior design. You’re meant to move in social, meaningful, and unpredictable contexts; modern gyms replicate none of those. The goal is to build habitats that naturally produce movement, not force it through obligation.

From Sitting to Standing

Your daylong chair time, not your lack of workouts, is the hidden killer. Studies by Dr. Jerry Morris, Seth Roberts, and James Levine confirm that even two minutes of light walking every 20 minutes improve metabolic markers. Durant recommends standing setups—like Woolf’s and Hemingway’s desks—or micro-movements integrated into work routines. These incremental redesigns beat sporadic gym visits.

The Psychology of Motivation

Durant found mirrors and machines uninspiring until he joined CrossFit. There, competition, ritual, and teamwork reignited motivation. He contrasts sterile training with meaningful movement: hero workouts, Tough Mudder races, or long team efforts inspire endurance through story and identity. “The difference between just so many miles and a marathon is meaning,” he writes—proof that the mind drives consistency.

Play and Skill as Evolutionary Fitness

To move well, you must rediscover play. Erwan Le Corre’s MovNat retreat in the jungles of Mexico reintroduces primal skills—balance on logs, swim, climb rocks, carry stones—building capability through environment. Durant frames this as functional ecology: adapt to constant change, not repetitive isolation. Movement becomes a dialogue with terrain, temperature, and tribe.

Durant’s final prescription is simple: make movement social, skillful, and story-shaped. The result is a body that performs naturally because its habitat restores purpose.

Hunting, in Durant’s world, is not brutality but ecological literacy. By revisiting it, you uncover an honest relationship with food, population control, and habitat management. You also learn that cultural disgust often hides ecological blindness.

Predators, Prey, and the Bambi Effect

Jackson Landers’ “Bambi Effect” captures how moral sentiment distorts ecological reality: when wolves vanish, deer overpopulate, starving en masse. Hunters act as surrogate predators, funding conservation via licenses and taxes. Durant’s own deer hunt—his anxiety in the blind, his relief at a clean shot—transforms abstraction into realism. Life feeds on life; the ethical act is to minimize suffering with competence and respect.

Eating Invasives and Ethical Pragmatism

Ecological imbalance extends to invasive species like Asian carp, lionfish, or feral pigs. Durant joins the “invasivore” movement, showing how eating invaders both feeds humans and restores ecosystems. The same logic applies to policy: conservation succeeds when incentive meets ethics. Romanticism without action—like misguided bans on horse slaughter—often worsens suffering. Pragmatism grounded in biology does better.

Hunting reconnects you to the real food web and cures the detachment industrial diets breed. Whether you hunt, fish, or simply choose responsibly sourced meat, the principle holds: acknowledge your place in the chain and act with stewardship, not sentimentality.

Durant’s final synthesis returns to the architectural metaphor that frames the book: modern humans live in self-built zoos. Just as curators redesign enclosures to elicit natural behavior in animals, you must rethink your environment so that healthy choices emerge by design, not effort.

Lessons from Zoo Science

When Jon Coe redesigned zoo habitats, he discovered that space and terrain alter psychology: enrich the landscape and stereotypical behaviors vanish. Penguin Beach at the London Zoo replaced concrete pools with natural textures and underwater visibility—instantly improving animal well-being and public empathy. Durant applies this same insight to human spaces: sterile architecture breeds malaise; naturalistic, variable environments restore vitality and cooperation.

Human Habitat Engineering

Your home and city set your baseline behavior. The design task is to embed ancestral cues—light, movement, community—into everyday life. Standing desks, group challenges, climate variation, and meaningful rituals make health the default outcome, not the heroic exception. MovNat’s jungle training ground operates as a life-sized prototype: uneven surfaces, surprise, and social bonding as performance enhancers.

Scaling Healthy Habitats

Durant also warns against local-food romanticism. Following Pierre Desrochers, he notes that sustainability requires realistic trade-offs: combine industrial efficiency with ecological ethics. Support local farms when it strengthens biodiversity, but embrace technology that feeds billions efficiently. The goal is scalable stewardship, not nostalgic purity.

Habitat thinking turns health into systems design. You shape environments that make the right behavior intuitive—at home and at civilization scale. The lesson: don’t fight your instincts. Build worlds where they work for you.