The importance of movement.

MOVE - The New Science of Body Over Mind - by Caroline Williams
When our ancestors split off from the other apes, they started adopting a very different lifestyle, one in which they spent far less time in the trees and started roaming longer distances on the ground in search of food.

At the time the climate in East Africa was becoming cooler and drier, and tropical forest was giving way to woodland and savannah. This made food more difficult to find and forced our ancestors to forage further afield.

Under these circumstances, evolution would have favoured those who could stand up straighter to walk or run long distances in search of food.

Those who were not only able to walk and run long distances but also to make intelligent decisions
– finding their way to where the best forage is found, remembering the way back to base and so on - 
were even more likely to survive and pass on their genes.

Around 2.6 million years ago
when hunting skills were added to gathering, thinking on our feet became yet more critical,
so these two selection pressures
– to walk further and think better
– were tied together in the unique evolutionary history of our species.

As a result, our physiology became fixed so that, when we exercise, the brain responds by physically adding more capacity...

...The specific challenges of survival as a hunter-gatherer tied the nuts and bolts of our mental capacity to our levels of activity. 

Sitting around is no longer an option for humankind if we want a healthy body and mind...

The evolutionary pressures that link moving and thinking are the very same ones that make moving feel good
– including the well-known endorphin boost, which makes exercise feel effortless, even euphoric,
and encourages us to keep going when we start to get tired...

...What we need to do is use that adaptability to spring into action once again, to unglue ourselves from the sofa, get up and remember how good it feels to move.