Evolving or devolving?

How can anyone look at the human body and believe that we're the product of a 'survival of the fittest' process?

Sure, we're an intelligent (in theory, at least), tool-using species. Wonderful. How did we survive long enough to make tools?

It takes well over a decade for a human to reach adulthood. I'm not speaking of a legal age, here, but of reaching physical maturity; the ability to breed and work. Most species do it in well under half the time. Wolves reach maturity in two to three years, lions in three to four. Natural live births in humans are almost always singletons, and take up most of a year. So a man needs to protect a reduced-capability woman, and then a helpless child, for over a decade when he himself is inferior to his competition! We don't survive by reproducing quickly, nor by having offspring that can survive on their own and add to the ability of the group to survive in short order.

The human body is unbelievably fragile, and most of it is a 'kill zone'. This is true in regard to both trauma and environmental conditions. Sure, we can build tools to survive in almost any environment on earth, but there are only a handful of places on earth we can survive, without tools, to make those tools. Again, we can make weapons that can flatten entire cities, or kill off entire populations, but in a one-on-one fight almost any man-sized predator can defeat an unarmed human. How did we survive to make the tools?

For that matter, we must examine not only how we survived without tools, but why tool-using ability should be a positive evolutionary selection. Sure, even simple tools greatly enhance human ability, but that's starting from quite a low baseline. Does a 1st-generation weapon (made from natural materials with tools themselves made from natural materials) make a human superior to most predators? No. A wooden spear or a flint knife isn't a match for the natural armament of an alpha predator.

Granted, most alpha predators don't pick a fight with humans. However, the modern forms of these creatures are generally the descendants of those who learned that firearm-equipped humans ARE superior to most predators. That is, humans POST-gunpowder (arguably post-steel) have achieved a super-alpha predator status, which has been true for scores of generations of most alpha predators. The modern rule of thumb is that a healthy wolf won't attack a human, but a huge mythology of wolves as man-killers exists for much of recorded human history. The balance of evidence seems to indicate that many alpha predators were man-eaters, but not eating people became a positive evolutionary trait at some point. Probably about the time our fighters and hunters started wearing armor and wielding second and third generation weapons. That took centuries if not millenia. How did we survive in the meantime?

So how did evolution 'know' that eventually tool-using would lead to super-alpha status? How did we protect our helpless infants with 1st-generation tools? How did we reproduce fast enough to offset our casualties? How did we convince alpha predators that we shouldn't be part of the food chain, except at the top? Most importantly, at each step of developing tool-using and intelligence, how was that ability superior to other available mutations? Why was a bigger brain superior to a tougher skull? Sure, in ten or twenty generations the bigger brains will invent helmets, but they're inferior to the thicker skull mutation for over a hundred years. Even once they invent helmets, they're still inferior when they're not wearing them.

I'm not saying that evolution doesn't play a factor in our past, just that by itself it appears to be an insufficient explanation for our physical construction.