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But actually, while being rubbish at sprinting, we are excellent, well-evolved long-distance runners. lions) and I thought that was just the price we had to pay for becoming bipedal and freeing up our hands for tool-use.
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We are very slow runners compared to most of our predators (e.g. I knew that we were good walkers but I hadn’t previously realised that we also evolved as runners. We covered long distances in great heat to find food, losing our fur and developing sweat glands to facilitate this activity in the hot African sun – retaining head hair to protect us from sunburn. In order to become efficient walkers our legs got longer, our hips turned inwards, we developed arches in our feet, and the end result was that we use significantly fewer calories to cover a given distance compared to a chimp. An example of this is the bipedal adaptation. becoming bipedal, losing our fur, developing better voice-boxes, etc, he describes each of these steps to a level of detail that really boosted my understanding of the subject.
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Although some of these are well-known to the point of being clichéd, e.g. Over these six million years or so our bodies have changed due to a sequence of important adaptations, and his explanations of each of these changes and their advantages in the environmental conditions of the time are truly enlightening. He spends the first half of the book describing how the human body evolved since the time of our last common ancestor with the other great apes. The author is a Harvard professor of biology, and the subject is the human body. I suppose the points made aren’t all that novel or mind-blowing, but they are made in a really entertaining, comprehensive and satisfying way and it is packed with insights reinforcing the world-view of evolutionary biology that I’ve gleaned from similar audiobooks on related topics. The last several chapters say -don't get fat, exercise, & eat a reasonable diet. The first few chapters on the evolution of Homo erectus and the development of bipedal gait covers well known ground, but does it with such astounding number of words & repetition as to obfuscate the important points. While telling us repeatedly about the terror of toxins in our environment he never talks about Hazard vs Risk which is very germane to any discussion of evolution. On several points with which I am very familiar, he is just wrong. Despite his tenure at a university with a medical school it seems he did not talk to folks there for insight and context of several issues like lipid metabolism, shoe wear, & back pain. Instead was a rather verbose listing of a few of his favorite themes- like flat feet which he brought up again & again. I was hoping for a detailed march of human evolution as documented by science and giving connection to the environmental changes that brought them on. The Professor traded his lectern in for a pulpit.
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And finally - provocatively - he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help nudge, push, and sometimes even compel us to create a more salubrious environment. Lieberman proposes that many of these chronic illnesses persist and in some cases are intensifying because of "dysevolution," a pernicious dynamic whereby only the symptoms rather than the causes of these maladies are treated. While these ongoing changes have brought about many benefits, they have also created conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, Lieberman argues, resulting in the growing incidence of obesity and new but avoidable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. Lieberman also elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and how our bodies were further transformed during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. The Story of the Human Body brilliantly illuminates as never before the major transformations that contributed key adaptations to the body: the rise of bipedalism the shift to a non-fruit-based diet the advent of hunting and gathering, leading to our superlative endurance athleticism the development of a very large brain and the incipience of cultural proficiencies. Lieberman - chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a leader in the field - gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years, even as it shows how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world is occasioning this paradox: greater longevity but increased chronic disease. In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E.