“Movement Matters”

“Total human movement is undergoing an exponential decline. If we represent the whole of human history with a single twenty- four- hour day, it took only one hour for anatomically modern humans to transition from hunting and gathering to farming, and a single minute for our culture to shift from farming to the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age. In mere seconds our bodies have gone from the dawn of computers to having computers that fit in our hands (and are in our hands for hours each day). Each of these technological steps forward was also a step toward decreased movement, but we are now in entirely new territory of rapidly accelerating sedentarism. This is true for all humans, but for the sake of this book and our species, I need to stress that human children have never moved as little as they move today.”

Katy Bowman