Shepard explains that this kind of childhood development evolved in the first eons of human existence as an adaptation to those environments: "small-group, leisured, foraging life-ways with natural surroundings. For us now, that world no longer exists."
But how we so differently adapt to our world runs counter to our biological evolution, "as it works much too slowly to make adjustments in our species in these ten millennia since the archaic foraging cultures began to be destroyed by their hostile, aggressive, better-organized, civilized neighbors."
"Programmed [in those earlier times] for the slow development toward a special kind of sagacity, we live in a world where that humility and tender sense of human limitation is no longer rewarded. Yet we suffer for the want of that vanished world, a deep grief we learn to misconstrue."
Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
pp.14-15
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