Do you think that EARLY MAN Could have ever been depressed?!

Do you think that EARLY MAN Could have ever been depressed?

Or depression is a cause of human needs and the modern world?

I'm sure there's some truth to the idea that if you don't have time to be depressed, you won't be. When I first noticed something more than unhappiness, it was about getting out of bed in college. Monday through Friday I did what it took to get to class. I don't remember feeling anything. But some Saturdays and Sundays it was amazing how little energy I had to get out of bed, not mere laziness, but a dead feeling.

This is not just about psychology. Patients with Parkinson's can suddenly move much better in a crisis such as a fire. The brain circuits that tell us it's time to panic or something not quite that do have an effect. So life and death situations would have masked depressions for those who lived long enough for depression to be likely. But how often did our ancestors really face life and death? Warfare was not common until after the agricultural revolution. There were no spoils to fight wars for until then.

It's bad if you don't take care of the hunting/gathering or the crops, but that might take as long to destroy your life as not going to work today. Depression in the past might have been a lot like today, but interpreted differently.

However much depression is genetic, it must have some reason to persist in the population. How much reason depends on how much these genes are actually present. Do whatever genes that cause bipolar diorder exist just in the 2% of people who are bipolar, or are those 2% the ones who combine several genes that are much more common individually? Is the evolutionary payoff for the genes that cause bipolar disorder to be found in periods of higher productivity or just having a lot of sex or something else? Is the payoff for any mood disorder not in the disorder itself, but in lesser expressions of the same genes that make people more sensitive, more emotional, more successfully romantic, leading to more sex and more offspring?

Sometime later in this century there will be answers to these questions. Once all 20,000 of our genes are understood, some of them will certainly be represented more in those with mood disorders. Variations in DNA sequences will let researchers track their history just as Y-chromosome analysis tells a story of male human migration today. I bet these genes didn't just start recently. What exactly their payoff is will be interesting to know. Maybe it's simple. Maybe it's complex. Maybe it's predictable. Maybe it's beyond what anyone today would guess. I like the idea that this is something that inevitably will be understood. Then once it's clear what is genetic, that will leave what's not genetic to be better understood as well. That will be so much better than speculation.