Rewilding the Academic Body

We are children of the Holocene, yet far from well adapted to its successor, the Anthropocene. Detailed experimental evidence continues to accumulate each year from research in a range of disciplines which demonstrates that an ancestral lifestyle has something to teach us about how to design a state of contemporary human flourishing. The rewilded Anthropocene human body is one that has made it to the comfortable sofa of a materially complex civilisation, but who has then decided to stand up and go outside. To motivate such a move we need more than a compendium of scientific evidence for ‘mismatch diseases’. In this paper I will argue that we also need to call on our cultural treasure trove of iconography and literature.