• TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    Habits can be adaptive, but addictions are more about external drugs hacking the brain. And highly refined and addictive drugs didn’t really exist in the ancestral environment. (Alcohol was first refined ~9000 years ago, which isn’t enough time to evolve an anti-addiction mechanism.)

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      11 months ago

      That’s true. There would have been things like khat they could have chewed on, but khat isn’t very addictive. In the new world there was coca leaves, but we haven’t been in the new world nearly as long and I’m not sure how addictive they even are without being concentrated.