Place, Tribe, and Being Pathologically Altruistic on PaleoJay's Smoothie Cafe

We sacrificed quite a bit when we moved from being paleolithic hunter gatherers.  We tend to focus primarily on what we gave up health-wise, since by starting to replace good wild game meats and gathered vegetables and fruits with low nutrient foods like grains and other such foodstuffs we not only became smaller and weaker, we became subject to many diseases.  

It has been a long time coming, and so slowly that we think it natural, but as most of us now know- by reintroducing ourselves to a diet more in keeping with that of our paleo ancestors, we can largely restore our health!  Most of you know the drill by now: wild caught seafood, grass fed meats, pastured butter, cheese, cream and eggs, vegetables and some fruits.  Exercise briefly and intensely as did our ancestors, and forge deep ties with our ‘tribe’; meaning family, friends, church members, and with your neighbors.  Spend time daily outdoors in nature, walking and communing with the natural world.

But I believe one thing is very overlooked in the modern paleo movement: 

The Importance of PLACE!

Of all things in the ancient past, the primacy of place- of your homeland- runs paramount to pretty much all else.  Our ancestral tribes, and I mean all ancestral tribes, lived amongst others very like them genetically.  Attackers were the other, and by evolution we were chosen to distrust those others- those with other languages, customs, gods, and religions.  Even those tribes that did not think as we did- either because they had chosen vastly different paths and worldviews- or because their intellects, chosen for by their own environments, were much weaker and less capable.  

Some environments did not put much value in developing intelligence, and in fact those peoples developed more physical abilities that would help them in the hunt with low technology.  Things like running faster, jumping higher, throwing farther; along with breeding in much greater numbers, since most offspring in those societies died off young from malnutrition and disease.  

I recently heard of a theory that makes quite a bit of sense to me:  those people who lived in the north, during the great ice age, only were able to survive by cooperating.  This would have been the ancient Europeans and certain Asian groups.  Their surviving members would have been selected for by their willingness and able ness to work together, and to sacrifice for one another in the tribe.  

Those races and groups from warmer, softer climes would have gone on warring endlessly, as they had always done- that was their evolutionary selection pressure, not working together and getting along as a large group.  And that worked fine for them- as long as they stayed in their own, ancestral lands!

Enter the modern world, with endless inferior foodstuffs, big crowded cities, and above all- world wide transportation, able to move people from various continents into our own northern latitudes in a matter of hours!  Along with this, imagine our own, European people; folk who evolved to have altruism in a high degree.  A strong urge not only of compassion for others, but an almost pathological altruism that compels some of us to sacrifice our own welfare and actual long-term existence to groups of ‘others’.  

When I say pathological altruism, I am referring especially to our huge, European white countries massive welfare states.  A system set up to help our own tribe’s most helpless people, where we care for our own.  When we are misguided enough to import massive amounts of the other tribes from around the globe, and then to support them

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