the story of the human body: evolution, health, and disease by daniel e. lieberman

'Riveting, enlightening, and more than a little frightening' - Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Runĭaniel Lieberman is the Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and a leader in the field. The Story of the Human Body, by one of our leading experts, takes us on an epic voyage' - Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish How is the present-day state of the human body related to the past? And what is the human body's future? The Story of the Human Body asks how our bodies got to be the way they are, and considers how that evolutionary history - both ancient and recent - can help us evaluate how we use our bodies. Never have we been so healthy and long-lived - but never, too, have we been so prone to a slew of problems that were, until recently, rare or unknown, from asthma, to diabetes, to - scariest of all - overpopulation. Our 21st-century lifestyles, argues Daniel Lieberman, are out of synch with our stone-age bodies. It's also normal to spend much of your time nursing, napping, making stone tools, and gossiping with a small band of people.

From an evolutionary perspective, if normal is defined as what most people have done for millions of years, then it's normal to walk and run 9 -15 kilometres a day to hunt and gather fresh food which is high in fibre, low in sugar, and barely processed. This ground-breaking book of popular science explores how the way we use our bodies is all wrong. In The Story of the Human Body, Daniel Lieberman, Professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, shows how we need to change our world to fit our hunter-gatherer bodies

The story of the human body: evolution, health, and disease by daniel e. lieberman