Sublime

Lieberman found that, no, we can’t go fast. But we can go far—especially in hot weather. The freaks among us can sustain speeds as high as 13 miles an hour for distances over 25 miles. Think: professional marathoners. But even hobbyist runners every weekend finish marathons in three to four hours, averaging about 9 to 6.5 miles an hour. On a hot da

Instead of eating plants and moving like predators, we move like plants and eat like predators.

ancestors were remarkably healthy. They were as tall or taller than modern Americans and Europeans, which is a sign they ate a very nutritious diet. They were virtually free of cavities and bone malformations that are common with malnutrition. Despite a lack of medical care, they had remarkably low infant mortality rates, yet had better than 10 per

I wouldn't want to carry that argument to the Tarahurnara Indians, who live in Copper Canyon in north-central Mexico. These Native American people are quite possibly the most physically fit people on Earth. Their level of endurance is, by our standards, stupendous. Their favorite pastime is a kind of kickball game that goes on for many days, in whi

While legends of violent meat-eating Homo sapiens vanquishing tribes of Neanderthals still garner rapt attention at dinner parties, there is little evidence that such events ever took place. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence for the less dramatic assertion that a combination of tools, hunting, gathering, and food-sharing permitted what

“Humans really are obligatorily required to do aerobic exercise in order to stay healthy, and I think that has deep roots in our evolutionary history,” Dr. Lieberman said. “If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.”

We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

If we compare gibbons, which are monogamous, with baboons, which are not, we see that baboons have marked sexual size dimorphism and enlarged canines. Polygyny—which is associated with strategies two and three from the previous chapter—leads inexorably both to male-male violence and to the morphology that enables that violence.