 Now, I'm going to warn you guys, this is going to be a bit of a change of tact for what you've experienced for the most of the day. This is going to be quite an academic talk. So expect a lot of references, citations, going to make sure you're all taking notes, and I'm going to pass a quiz out at the end. So you'll get your grades back by Sunday. Okay, so let's get started. Oh, if the clicker wants to work. There we go. Right. Okay, so the talk's going to cover this idea of kind of evolutionary fitness or paleo fitness. The whole kind of paleo idea has become very, very popular within the lay press and the academic sphere over the last few years. I mean, everyone here has probably heard of the paleo diet. Hands up if you heard of the paleo diet. There we go. That's pretty much everyone. Okay. So it's got a lot more momentum. It's become a lot more popular. And something that's kind of rolled up in the whole idea of paleo diet has been this idea of paleo fitness as well. So the idea that we should be exercising in an evolutionary, evolutionarily congruent manner. And this has been becoming more and more popular in the lay press. We've got various books, move now crossfit, although I'm going to have to sort of pretend that if the clicker works, pretend I didn't say crossfit because apparently they're actually suing the NSCA at the moment. So pretend I wasn't talking about crossfit just in case this comes back to bite me in the ass. So, but anyway, it's been very, very popular in terms of the lay press and the academic sphere recently. And there's been a number of review papers covering the idea that we should be exercising like our evolutionarily evolutionary ancestors. We should be exercising in a paleo evolutionary fitness type approach. And there's some justification for this. If the clicker wants to go, there we go. Right. And there's some justification for this. So if you've read any of the literature or you familiarize yourselves with the works of guys like Lauren Cordain, Rob Wolfe, you tend to see that the same few studies are trotted out over and over and over again to support the idea that hunter-gatherers evolutionary man was fit, robust, healthy, fast, strong, had good body composition, low body fat, good hip to waist ratio, so on and so forth. And you get given this very romantic picture of what hunter-gatherers looked like. Now what I wanted to do was actually go back into the literature and look at it with a bit more of a sober perspective, a bit more skepticism and see whether or not the whole body of literature actually supported this view. Because I didn't necessarily think that this was just all there was to see. These are only a few studies, so I wanted to go in and see whether or not the whole of the literature actually supported this viewpoint. So as I said, I think this is a bit of a romantic view. So let's just cover physical activity in general quickly. So we all know that physical activity is beneficial to our health and well-being, our fitness, and we know that physical activity, it protects against all-cause mortality and morbidity in a dose response type manner. So the more we're physically active, the more we see a reduction in our risk for all-cause mortality and different morbidities. But recently studies have started to question whether or not the volume of activity, i.e. how much we're active, actually provides the benefits that we think it does. And we've started to find that actually the intensity of effort involved in the activity, so how hard the exercise actually is, seems to provide a much more powerful benefit. So if we're exercising in a more intense manner, we tend to see significantly greater reductions in all-cause mortality and survival statistics. And this ties up actually as well with studies that show that physical fitness parameters seem to be even stronger predictors of all-cause mortality, health and well-being. So for example, VO2max is one of the strongest predictors of cardiac disease, morbidity and mortality as well. We tend to see that VO2max is higher in the obese yet metabolically healthier, healthy and lower in those who are normal weight but metabolically obese. Even strength and muscle mass are significant predictors of health and well-being and reduced all-cause mortality. So it seems to be that actually what's more important is the intensity of the activity. And this is what modern exercise physiology is starting to support. So what I wanted to do was actually take some of these concepts and go back and look at the literature regarding our evolutionary past and what our physical activity patterns were in that evolutionary past.