His research and discoveries have been highlighted in newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Discover, and National Geographic. He has written nearly 100 articles, many appearing in the journals Nature and Science, and his cover story on barefoot running in Nature was picked up by major media the world over. Departing from the moment our ancestors first distinguished themselves from their hominid brethren, Daniel Lieberman traces the biological history of humans right down to our office-bound present. How is the present-day state of the human body related to the past? And what is the human bodys future?ĭaniel 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 (2013) is a fascinating exploration of a story over a million years in the making: the evolution of the human body. 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 Dan Lieberman, are out of synch with our stone-age bodies. Its 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 its normal to walk and run 9 -15 kilometers a day to hunt and gather fresh food which is high in fibre, low in sugar, and barely processed. Only 10,000 years ago the sweetest fruit was only about as sweet as today’s carrot, according to Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman in his new book, The Story of the Human Body.As a result, we are just not genetically able to handle the hybridized fruits and starches that have all gotten sweeter and sweeter. (With charts and line drawings throughout.Story of the Human Body explores how the way we use our bodies is all wrong. He was educated at Harvard (AB ’86 Summa cum Laude, PhD ’93) and Cambridge (M.Phil. He is also a member of Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard University. 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. Daniel Lieberman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and the Edwin M. 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. In this myth-busting book, Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a pioneering researcher on the evolution of human physical activity, tells the story of how we never evolved to exerciseto do voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. 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.