What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

by Scott Carney

biological relationship between life and its environment is the most ancient transfer of knowledge that any human can ever experience. It’s so ingrained in our very beings that the language of evolutionary programming isn’t a thought, it’s a feeling: a shiver, a rush of blood, or a quickening of the senses. Just a hundred years ago most of us knew the language of shivering. A thousand years before that our bodies tracked with the seasons. Ten thousand or more years before that our species migrated between continents on rafts of seaweed and surmounted mountains in little more than animal skins and leather soles. Those ancestors probably didn’t think of themselves as different from the environment at all. They knew what we are learning again today. That we are all just here. Surviving. Together.