The Story of the Human Body

Evolution, Health, and Disease

By: Daniel E. Lieberman

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. 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.

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 also elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and how our bodies were further transformed during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.

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 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. 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.

(With charts and line drawings throughout.)

From tree to car

This is a really enjoyable book. 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 author is a Harvard professor of biology, and the subject is the human body. 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. 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. Although some of these are well-known to the point of being clichéd, e.g. 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.

An example of this is the bipedal adaptation. 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. 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. I knew that we were good walkers but I hadn’t previously realised that we also evolved as runners. We are very slow runners compared to most of our predators (e.g. lions) and I thought that was just the price we had to pay for becoming bipedal and freeing up our hands for tool-use. But actually, while being rubbish at sprinting, we are excellent, well-evolved long-distance runners. There is evidence that we hunted large mammals using a ‘persistence’ method; We would patiently jog after a large mammal, which would gallop off until it had to rest in the shade. We would catch up with it and it would gallop off again before it had time to fully recover, and this sequence would continue until the beast eventually collapsed with heat-stroke, making it an easy kill.

The second part of the book focuses on the concept of evolutionary ‘mismatch’. This is a detailed look at how, when faced with a changing environment, our bodies have initially been poorly matched and have taken time to adapt. There is then a special emphasis on the mismatches that we currently face, with our modern Western lifestyle (the extremely new environment of chairs, beds, computers, pollution, abundant high calorie food, etc, etc).

So many modern chronic diseases seem to be associated with us using our bodies in ways they weren’t adapted for. They are too numerous to mention, but examples are heart disease, fallen arches, type 2 diabetes, short-sightedness and lower back pain. These diseases are rare in present day hunter-gatherer societies, and it isn’t because they don’t live long enough to succumb to these ‘old-age’ disorders, the older members of these societies don’t typically get them either.

So there’s a really good discussion of how modern ailments have resulted from the mismatch between our bodies and our new environment. Again, this is not a particularly novel idea, but it’s a thorough and stimulating discussion with many suggestions for how we could prevent or reduce these diseases, both on a societal and a personal level. If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Fascinating

Kind of boggles the mind to think mankind has been around hundreds of thousands of years. First part of the book is an evolution history lesson, second part is an examination of where we currently are and implications for the future. Very readable, Lieberman often points out evolution facts (learned through fossil discoveries) and assumptions. Some surprising facts like most people have 1-3% Neanderthal DNA and most of the world can be traced back to a small community of 14,000 people in Africa. Overall, Lieberman has made what could have been a very dry book, come to life.

Agree this is 2 Books, one a 5 the other a 3

The whole Jared Diamond thing about farming being the worst thing humans ever did is so dumb. The Sapiens guy spews this silliness too. One of the funniest things about this is when it appears in a book about evolution, it just comes off as even more ridiculous: so each step along the way, going bipedal, etc., made sense until this larger brain made a big mistake? It's a case of doing exactly what evolution taught us science must not do!! ('Nothing in the past makes sense except in light of evolution...')

I was also disappointed when the author got up on his soapbox about people being mean to fat people. He said that was like being mad at the poor (what?? wrong) and that in fact obesity and being poor do coincide (yes). There's a huge difference: a person who is eating a garbage diet has other choices. Half the world lives on a dollar a day and those people are not using up hundreds of thousands on bypasses and infusions. A poor person can't just go to a store and buy something else to solve their economic problems?

The thing about authors like Lieberman and Harari is they might have been pushed by editors to put some sizzle, but then, the good parts of the book are demoted and pushed into the background.

What he says is excellent

What he says is excellent, and the first two or three times he tells me, I say yes, that's so true. The fifth or sixth time, I say, yes, you said that before. I got it.

Very insightful to understanding your own body!

This is a great book for anybody interested in understanding how evolution shaped us to be the way we are today, as well as understanding how we ended up with so many “mismatch” diseases- those which are prevalent today because of, or even despite our modern convenient and comfortable environments.
Really gets you thinking about what the concept of “healthy” really means.