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Name: The Story of the Human Body
Rating: 4.6 (139 reviews)
Author: Daniel Lieberman

Daniel Lieberman

Evolution, Health, and Disease

4.6 (139 ratings)

32 mins

Brief summary

The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman is a compelling scientific narrative that explains the course of human evolution, why our bodies are the way they are, and how our everyday habits harm our health.

Topics

The Body Change & Evolution Aging Diseases & Illnesses

Table of Contents

The Story of the Human Body
Summary of 11 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 11

What’s in it for me? Human history from hominids to Homo sapiens.

Nature moves slowly. It measures time in millennia rather than centuries. The development of the human body is a story millions of years in the making.

But social history and deep biological time stopped moving in tandem during the age of industrialization. Today, life is an embarrassment of riches. We eat too much and exercise too little.

That’s created a mismatch between our prehistoric bodies and the modern world we inhabit. Obesity, diabetes and osteoporosis are on the rise in the wealthiest and most advanced nations.

If we want to change that, Harvard-based paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman argues, we have to understand what the human body really is and where it came from. The Story of the Human Body helps us do just that.

A far-ranging evolutionary history of homo sapiens, it charts the development of humanity from its origins in central Africa millions of years ago right down into our office-bound present.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how natural selection interacts with environmental changes;
why posture can shape the fortunes of an entire species;
why the birth of agriculture was both a blessing and a curse.

Evolution works according to the logic of natural selection and adaptation.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Between its covers was a theory that shook the world. Centuries of religious ideas about the history of humanity were turned on their head.

So what does this famous book say?

Let’s start with the fundamentals.

According to Darwin, the driving force behind evolution is natural selection. This simply means that the best-adapted members of a particular species are “selected” by nature. Because of that, they survive and go on to reproduce.

Natural selection can be broken down into three separate – but interlinked – components.

First, there’s variability. By that Darwin meant that each individual organism is different from other members of the same species.

Next comes genetic heritability. Every organism passes genetic traits on to its offspring.

Then there’s differential reproductive success. That’s a mouthful, right? What it means is that different organisms will produce a different number of offspring that go on to reproduce in their turn.

Natural selection is usually driven by negative selection.

That’s when an organism has “negative” heritable traits. A good example in humans is the genetic disorder hemophilia. These traits lower chances of reproductive success.

An organism with negative traits is less likely to produce offspring than competitors which don’t have them. That’s because, like humans with hemophilia, these organisms would be less likely to survive – if it weren’t for modern medicine!

Negative selection, therefore, favors the status quo. It likes to leave things as they are. Organisms without significant new heritable traits come out on top.

That’s essentially a biological process. But what about the environment?

Well, when dramatic environmental changes occur, natural selection uses a different tool – adaption.

This describes how an individual develops new heritable traits that help it adapt to new surroundings. These help both the original organism and its offspring thrive.

A good example of a large-scale environmental change which triggers this kind of evolutionary adaptation is climate change.

And that’s Darwin’s theory of evolution in a nutshell! In the following blinks, we’ll dig a bit deeper and explore how the history of the human body fits into all this.

Walking upright made humans what they are. It came with both costs and one big advantage.

What sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom – is it, for example, our large brains or perhaps our unique opposable thumbs?

Actually, it’s our posture!

Dietary changes brought us another step closer to becoming modern humans.

Let’s stick with chimpanzees a little longer. The average chimp spends about half of its waking hours chewing. That’s partly because of the things they eat. Palm fruits, wild figs and grapes are all firm favorites. But they’re not like the fruits we see when we go grocery shopping. They’re much less sweet and a good deal more fibrous.

That means eating is hard work. In fact, if a chimp wants to make sure it’s getting enough to eat, it has to consume about a kilogram of food every hour and spend the next two hours digesting!

Our first recognizably human ancestors were hunter-gatherers.

How far back in time would we have to travel to meet a recognizably human ancestor?

Well, around 1.9 million years ago, Homo erectus walked the earth. This species of archaic humans spread rapidly across Africa and Eurasia. Its success was down to the lifestyle it invented. It was the first hunter-gatherer.

Many of the adaptations that define who we are occurred during the Ice Age.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle opened up new and better food sources for our early ancestors. That allowed them to spread far and wide from their original stomping grounds in Central Africa. Having gradually dispersed northward, they reached the Caucasus Mountains around 1.8 million years ago.

Access to extra calories changed their bodies profoundly and humans developed larger brains. That was just as well. The Ice Age which had begun around 2.6 million years ago would be around for a while yet – in fact, it only ended 11,700 years ago! It was a tough time presenting plenty of conundrums. Extra gray cells didn’t go amiss.

Homo sapiens outlived other species of humans thanks to its superior culture.

Modern man, Homo sapiens, emerged in sub-Saharan Africa around 200,000 years ago. The species spread quickly. By around 30,000 years ago, modern humans were living on every continent.

Humanity can trace its ancestry back to a very small group. The population of Homo sapiens from which we are descended as a species was made up of just 14,000 individuals. For non-Africans, that’s even smaller: they have just 3,000 common ancestors!

The emergence of agriculture led to a population explosion but also brought famine and disease.

The American ecologist Jared Diamond called agriculture the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Abandoning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and settling down to farm the land wasn’t exactly an advantage for our ancestors. Agriculture is a backbreaking pursuit, and the diet of farmers was much worse than that of their free-ranging forefathers.

So why did it catch on? Well, farming does have its upsides. Most importantly, it provides a growing population with a reliable source of sustenance.

The Industrial Revolution had a massive impact on human life.

The Industrial Revolution was kickstarted by the invention of machines capable of mass-producing various goods. It first took root in eighteenth-century England. It’s been slowly spreading across the face of the earth ever since.

Before the advent of the industrial age, the world’s population was around one billion. Now there are seven billion people on earth, most of them living in cities. The planet hasn’t been the same since.

Modern life is an embarrassment of riches, and our bodies are struggling to cope.

The human body is the product of millions of years of slow evolution. But time has started moving too quickly for us since the Industrial Revolution. Our bodies are struggling to keep pace with the speed of social change.

That’s given rise to so-called mismatch diseases. These are caused by the conflict between modern life and our prehistoric bodies.

Our health can suffer when we don’t use our bodies to do the things for which they were designed.

When astronauts return from space, they must be carried to keep their leg bones from snapping under the strain of walking. That’s an extreme example of an everyday truth: if we don’t use something enough, we start losing our ability to use it all.

Physical exercise is incredibly important for this reason.

Education and medicine can’t prevent mismatch diseases, but we can change our environment.

Modern society has created environments which just don’t suit our bodies. Because we’re mismatched with the world around us, we develop mismatch diseases like type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis.

So it’s hardly surprising that around 20 percent of the GDP of the United States is spent on healthcare. But offense is better than defense. Around 70 percent of all illnesses could be prevented if we all exercised more regularly and ate more healthily.

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What is The Story of the Human Body about?

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. 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.

Best quote from The Story of the Human Body

Height is a good measure of health. Before farming, humans were several centimeters taller than they were 300 years ago. Height only increased again after the eighteenth century.

—Daniel Lieberman

Who should read The Story of the Human Body?

Anyone who’s ever wondered how we got from cave- to city-dwelling
Fans of big-picture science
Anyone interested in nutrition and fitness

About the Author

Daniel Lieberman is a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University, where he is chair of the department of human evolutionary biology. He is best known for his prize-winning research into the evolution of the human head and body. He has authored over a hundred articles for prestigious scholarly journals including Nature and Science. His previous books include The Evolution of the Human Head (2011).

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