And what do I mean by genuinely healthy? Well, imagine a remote village or a mountain valley or a far island settlement very difficult to get to, where there lived a thousand or perhaps ten thousand people. Rarely fewer, rarely more. Among that small population there were no medical doctors and no dentists, no drugs, no vaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the isolation carried with it illiteracy and precluded contact with or awareness of modern science, so there was little or no notion of public hygiene. And this was before the era of antibiotics. Yet these unprotected, undoctored, unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and die from bacterial infections; and the women did not have to give birth to 13 children to get 2.4 to survive to breeding age--almost all the children made it through the gauntlet of childhood diseases. There was also virtually no degenerative disease like heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There were few if any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren't any aspirin in the entire place. Oh, and there was very little mortality during childbirth, as little or less than we have today with all our hospitals. And the people uniformly had virtually perfect teeth and kept them all till death, but did not have toothbrushes nor any notion of dental hygiene. Nor did they have dentists or physicians. (Price, 1970) And in those fortunate places the most common causes of death were accident (trauma) and old age. The typical life span was long into the 70s and in some places quite a bit longer. One fabled place, Hunza, was renowned for having an extraordinarily high percentage of vigorous and active people over 100 years old. I hope I've made you curious. "How could this be?" you're asking. Well, here's why. First, everyone of those groups lived in places so entirely remote, so inaccessible that they were of necessity, virtually self-sufficient. They hardly traded at all with the outside world, and certainly they did not trade for bulky, hard-to-transport bulk foodstuffs. Virtually everything they ate was produced by themselves. If they were an agricultural people, naturally, everything they ate was natural: organic, whole, unsprayed and fertilized with what ever local materials seemed to produce enhanced plant growth. And, if they were agricultural, they lived on a soil body that possessed highly superior natural fertility. If not an agricultural people they lived by the sea and made a large portion of their diets sea foods. If their soil had not been extraordinarily fertile, these groups would not have enjoyed superior health and would have conformed to the currently widely-believed notion that before the modern era, people's lives were brutish, unhealthful, and short.