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Semiregular strenuous exercise is something humans evolved to do, and it's still mentally taxing - no matter how fit you are, you'll be tired and a lot less able to do difficult intellectual stuff after a long game of / session at the gym. I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's 'mentally taxing'. Evolution involved playing a lot of different tradeoffs against each other, not just a bunch of unreserved goods in all contexts.
The kinds of exercise humans evolved to do were long walks or jogs as a group to obtain a reward. The Hunter gatherer tribes still existent would walk to follow herds, and there are some that jog out to tire an animal (humans are the best at endurance jogging, not sprinting). You then have the exercise of chopping wood or obtaining dwelling materials.
Modern strenuous exercise attempts to be cost efficient but humans didn’t quite evolve for “sprinting for no reason” or “repeatedly lifting up extremely heavy thing while laying down”. When you take a fat American and you place him in a European city where he has to walk 30 minutes to obtain the
buffalo meatcappuccino, this is generally considered relaxing and is why a lot of people are promoting walkable cities. There are studies on this. Importantly, humans evolved to not exercise when there is no salient appetizing reward.Human males often evolved to fight, I suppose. I think men would be a lot more relaxed if they got to punch their boss.
But I’m at a loss why you think humans evolved to do difficult intellectual work. That’s the one thing we do that we are least evolved to do, and so it requires tremendous social incentive, decades of training, and the decidedly non-evolutionary skill of reading to accomplish. We did evolve to learn complex physical skills through imitating older members of the community, but that is much different.
I agree that most exercise was light over long durations, and the fact they're light + long-duration means they don't cause one to be that tired, but that coexisted with less-frequent shorter periods of strenuous exercise, which do cause exhaustion. Things like fighting other humans, moving heavy things.
We did "evolve to do difficult intellectual work". Things like planning for human conflicts or making boats are quite complicated.
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