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I mean…

Chimps get money, invent prostitution

Engaged in a 4 year tribal war

Like much of evolution, it repurposes and adds on, it doesn’t often reinvent. There’s debate around Dunbar’s number, but some agreement that a lot of us can manage about 50 active personal connections (albeit with high variability). The fact that we added in religion, culture, nations are more meta-evolutions of society (largely enabled by language and written language), not necessarily saying we’ve adapted our brains significantly from 10,000 years ago, but that social structures enabling mass cooperation were generally advantageous for production and competition.

At some point in history pro-social behaviors helped individuals survive and procreate. So it follows that the ones in the species who developed pro- social behaviors were the ones having babies who survived, and those behaviors passed down. Everyone alive today had ancestors who survived long enough to procreate.

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I just want to add that a reason stress causes health issues is that your body shifts it's attention and energy away from systems in the body that heal, provide maintenance (as well as your immune system as mentioned above) so that it can put that energy toward things that help with fight for flight. Moreover, some of those fight or flight modes, like high blood pressure, can be harmful on their own in the long run. Short bursts of stress aren't unhealthy. It is the chronic, long term stress that wears on your body.

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It's inaccurate to say that the social systems "remained", as that suggests they're the same throughout our evolutionary history since first acquiring them. Our sociality has evolved along with us, and is different from that of our non-human ancestors and from the extinct species of our genus. The only thing that's the same is the bare fact of being a social species.

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fascinating, thanks for the response!

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Physical inactivity is the easier half of the question to answer. Lean muscle mass generally reduces risk of injury, increases bone density, increases bmr, decreases body fat, improves blood glucose levels, and helps with balance. Intense exercise can actually decrease appetite. Exposure to bright light throughout the day (during exercise for example) has also been shown to decrease appetite and increase satiety. Visceral fat can be more common in sedentary life styles and is suspected to cause pro inflammatory compounds and is correlated with many negative health outcomes.

Here is a study that I found after a quick Google that seems to give a better explanation than I have done above.

A piece from the abstract:

>Physical fitness appears to buffer against stress-related disease owing to its blunting/optimizing effects on hormonal stress responsive systems, such as the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and the sympathetic nervous system. This blunting appears to contribute to reduced emotional, physiological and metabolic reactivity as well as increased positive mood and well-being. Another mechanism whereby regular exercise and/or physical fitness may confer resilience is through minimizing excessive inflammation. Chronic psychological stress, physical inactivity and abdominal adiposity have been associated with persistent, systemic, low-grade inflammation and exert adverse effects on mental and physical health. The anti-inflammatory effects of regular exercise/activity can promote behavioural and metabolic resilience, and protect against various chronic diseases associated with systemic inflammation. Moreover, exercise may benefit the brain by enhancing growth factor expression and neural plasticity, thereby contributing to improved mood and cognition. In summary, the mechanisms whereby physical fitness promotes increased resilience and well-being and positive psychological and physical health are diverse and complex.

Edit : link

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4142018/#:~:text=Proposed%20mechanisms%20by%20which%20exercise,stress%20%5B30%2C32%5D.

Wikipedia has lists

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Thanks for the info. As I was replying I got to thinking there must be a DB that has the info like number of comets, periods, magnitudes, etc.

Be interesting to take a peek.

And just in case it isn't common knowledge, the ultimate cause of those physiological processes is the evolution of a social species. Pre-human apes became highly social as fruit-eating tree-dwelling creatures, and then as they came out of the trees and evolved over the generations as upright-standing apes, the social systems remained, and when H. sapiens evolved, the social system was still there. We need human connection because of that evolution that created our bodies, and that is where the cortisol and psychological distress vs joy comes into play.