The Story of the Human Body

A review of Daniel E. Lieberman’s book about evolution, health, and disease

I had a blast with this one. It was a lot heavier on evolution than I expected, covering perhaps more than half the book, but that made it much better. It was well written and the author is very trustworthy, being a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University for almost 2 decades and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

It starts with the birth of the Homo genus and how we diverged from apes. First by becoming biped, which made us exponentially more energy-efficient for covering long distances at the expense of tree climbing, and then by changing our diets, by relying less on fruit and processing food like tubers and meat. For plants specifically, even basic food processing like cutting or grinding can break down a good amount of fiber, making it easier to digest.

Afterwards, he moves on to more specific changes in our anatomy. Of course, the brain is a big one, but many others that you likely never thought of before, from your hips, spine curvature, feet or jaw. We also got fatter compared to most apes, and we mature a lot slower. Every detail is explained exactly why it happened or at the very least the several hypotheses that have been proposed when the cause is very clear yet.

The next part goes into the shapes that we went through from farming and the industrial revolution. The massive increase in quality of life that culminated from it, and yet the cause of many of our current health problems. And lastly, he connects these two parts — evolution and birth of the modern era, to reveal how they affect our health and contribute to diseases. The basic premise is simply that we live with a lifestyle and in an environment that our body wasn’t adapted for, called the evolutionary mismatch. This includes obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, myopia, and many many more.

The book ends with a more practical note — taking into account what causes many of our health problems and diseases, what can we do about it? Both individually as a society. While the book seems somewhat marketed as being heavy in nutrition, it actually doesn’t contain that much on it. But that’s for a good reason, there isn’t that much to say. While nutrition can, of course, get very complex, for the current purpose — its causes and solutions are somewhat straightforward, the problem is how hard it is to change the environment that produces our ill health. The evolutionary context allows one to understand the ultimate cause of those problems and avoid misguided solutions.

While I’m fairly familiar with both evolution and nutrition, I learned a fair bit with the book, and I was never bored. At the beginning of the book, I believe the author went a bit too in-depth into several humanoid species and their differences, which I don’t think adds that much value to the narrative, but overall I think everything fit well and was properly argued and supported. If you want to understand many of our health problems, this is a must-read book. Not only with a ton of knowledge, but quite fun to dig into as well. Especially for those that aren’t very familiar with either evolution or nutrition but are interested in the topic, this will likely be a favourite.

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Tiago V.F.