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What it argues
The Story of the Human Body is Daniel Lieberman's account of how evolutionary biology can explain the chronic diseases that plague modern populations. Lieberman is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard and the author of extensive research on the evolution of the human body, particularly the biomechanics of running. This book is his synthesis: a history of the human body from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens followed by an analysis of how the mismatch between the bodies evolution gave us and the environments we now inhabit produces the diseases that consume modern medicine.
The first half is evolutionary narrative. Lieberman traces the anatomical changes that produced the modern human body: the shift to bipedalism, the reduction of body hair, the changes in the foot and skull that came with endurance running and larger brains, the changes in diet that accompanied the development of cooking and, later, agriculture. Each change is explained in terms of the selective pressures that drove it and the tradeoffs it imposed. The story is accessible and engaging — Lieberman is a good writer and the material is genuinely fascinating.
What it gets right
- 1.
The human body was shaped by evolution for environments radically different from modern ones — this mismatch, not genetics alone, explains most of the chronic diseases that dominate modern medicine.
- 2.
Endurance running is a uniquely human capability that played a central role in human evolution — the modern human body is built for sustained aerobic activity, not the sedentary life of desk work.
- 3.
Agriculture, while enabling civilization, was a nutritional step down from hunter-gatherer diets in many respects: smaller stature, more dental disease, and more carbohydrate-centered diets with less dietary variety.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Daniel Lieberman is the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences and a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, where he chairs the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He received his PhD from Harvard and has conducted fieldwork on human and hominin evolution, physical activity, and locomotion in Kenya, South Africa, and elsewhere. His laboratory research on the biomechanics of running and barefoot locomotion has been widely cited. His other book, Exercised, applies a similar evolutionary lens to physical activity and modern health. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
