Lieberman, D. E. (2013). The story of the human body: Evolution, health, and disease. Pantheon Books.

This book begins with a puzzle. We live in paradoxical times for our bodies. On one hand, this is likely the healthiest era in human history. In many parts of the world, diseases that once killed in droves—smallpox, the plague, polio—have been conquered or quelled. We can reasonably expect our children to survive to adulthood, and for us to live into our dotage. Formerly life-threatening conditions like a broken leg or appendicitis are now easily remedied. Yet, on the other hand, we could be doing much better. A wave of chronic, preventable illnesses is sweeping the globe. These are not the ancient infectious scourges, but modern ailments: type 2 diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, osteoporosis, but also a host of less deadly but debilitating troubles like lower back pain, anxiety, and myopia. These aren’t just diseases of old age; they are increasingly appearing in middle-aged people. How can our time be both a golden age for health and a burgeoning crisis of chronic disease?

The author, a professor of human evolutionary biology, argues that this paradox stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of our own bodies. The key lies in an idea best illustrated by a story from the source text: the “Mystery Monkey” of Tampa, Florida. This macaque lived for years on city streets, evading capture. While most people saw it as an animal out of place, an anomaly in a suburban environment, they rarely apply the same logic to themselves. From an evolutionary perspective, a human living in a modern city, surrounded by cars, processed food, and air-conditioning, is just as far removed from their ancestral environment as that monkey. Our bodies, the product of millions of years of evolution in environments of scarcity and physical hardship, are now operating in a world of unprecedented abundance and comfort. This profound mismatch between our ancient biology and our modern lives is the engine driving the chronic diseases that plague us.

This naturally leads to the question at the heart of the book: What are human bodies adapted for? The answer is more complex and less intuitive than it first appears. It’s tempting to think of adaptation in terms of perfection or optimality for a specific lifestyle, like that of a Stone Age hunter-gatherer. This logic fuels trends like the “paleodiet.” But this view misunderstands what adaptation means in biology. Natural selection does not shape organisms to be healthy, long-lived, or happy. It shapes them for one primary purpose: reproductive success. Adaptations are simply heritable traits that, in a particular environment, helped an individual’s ancestors have more surviving offspring than their competitors. A craving for sugar and fat was a superb adaptation when calories were scarce and starvation was a constant threat; it helped our ancestors store energy and survive to reproduce. In a modern supermarket, that same inherited craving becomes a direct path to obesity and diabetes. The adaptation itself is not “good” or “bad”; its value is entirely dependent on the context.

Furthermore, the human body is not a perfectly engineered machine, but a palimpsest—an old manuscript page written on over and over again. Each stage of our evolutionary history has layered new adaptations on top of older ones, creating a jumble of compromises. Our teeth, inherited from fruit-eating ape ancestors, are superb for chewing figs but terrible for gnawing raw meat. Our upright posture, which freed our hands, also gave us weak lower backs prone to aching. There was no single environment for which the human body is “optimally” designed. To understand what we are adapted for is to understand this entire, messy history, not just a snapshot from the late Stone Age. The author suggests this history can be understood through a series of major transformations, which function as the book’s narrative spine.

The book charts this history through five major biological transitions. It begins with the first human ancestors diverging from apes and evolving to be upright bipeds. This was followed by the evolution of the australopiths, who developed adaptations to eat a much wider range of foods beyond fruit. About two million years ago, the first members of our own genus, Homo, evolved nearly modern bodies and bigger brains, becoming the first hunter-gatherers. As these archaic humans spread, they evolved even larger brains and slower-growing bodies. Finally, the fifth transition was the evolution of modern humans, Homo sapiens, with our unique capacities for language, culture, and cooperation, which allowed us to become the sole surviving human species on the planet.

However, the story does not end there. Evolution is not just a study of the past; it is an ongoing process. And for humans, the most powerful evolutionary force today is not biological, but cultural. Biological evolution is slow, passing changes through genes from parent to child. Cultural evolution is lightning-fast, passing new ideas and behaviors between any individuals. Two cultural revolutions have been so transformative that they amount to a sixth and seventh transition. The Agricultural Revolution, starting around 10,000 years ago, radically changed our diet and settlement patterns. More recently, the Industrial Revolution began to replace human labor with machines, further altering how we work, live, and interact. These cultural shifts have created the novel environments our bodies are now struggling with.

This sets up the book’s central argument: we are caught in a feedback loop, a dynamic the author calls “dysevolution.” First, our rapid cultural evolution creates novel environments we are poorly adapted for. Second, this mismatch causes chronic, noninfectious diseases. Third, for various reasons—be it difficulty, cost, or a lack of understanding—we often fail to address the root environmental causes of these diseases. Instead, we use our cultural ingenuity (medicine, technology) to treat the symptoms. This allows the underlying mismatch to persist and even worsen, as we pass on the disease-causing environments and behaviors to the next generation. Understanding this loop—the intricate dance between our ancient, inherited bodies and our rapidly evolving culture—is the key not only to making sense of modern illness, but to finding a way to a healthier future.

PART I - Apes and Humans

This part of the book considers the first several million years of our lineage, tracing the major biological transformations that turned an ape‑like ancestor into the hunter-gatherers of the genus Homo.

Lieberman, D. E. (2013). Ch. 2 - Upstanding Apes. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books

This chapter explores the first and arguably most fundamental transition in human evolution—the shift to bipedalism. It examines the fossil evidence from our earliest ancestors, such as Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”), to understand the anatomical changes in the feet, hips, and spine that made walking on two legs possible. The central argument is that bipedalism was not an end in itself but an adaptation that allowed early hominins to forage more efficiently over longer distances as Africa’s climate changed and forests gave way to woodlands.

Lieberman, D. E. (2013). Ch. 3 - Much Depends on Dinner. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.

With our ancestors now walking upright, this chapter focuses on the next major evolutionary driver—diet. It introduces the australopiths, including the famous fossil “Lucy.” The core of this chapter argues that as preferred foods like fruit became less available, our ancestors evolved crucial adaptations for eating tough, hard-to-chew “fallback foods” like roots and tubers. This shift is visible in their skeletons, which feature enormous, flat cheek teeth, powerful jaws, and massive chewing muscles designed for grinding fibrous plant matter.

Lieberman, D. E. (2013). Ch. 4 - The First Hunter-Gatherers. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.

This chapter describes the third major transformation—the emergence of the genus Homo and the development of a nearly modern human body. It focuses on Homo erectus, an ancestor with long legs, short arms, arched feet, and a large brain. The argument is that this new body plan was an integrated suite of adaptations for a hunter‑gatherer lifestyle, which involved not just gathering plants but also acquiring meat through endurance running, cooperation, and the use of the first simple stone tools.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 5 - Energy in the Ice Age. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

Here, the book explores the profound energetic consequences of the hunter‑gatherer lifestyle. The higher‑quality diet, rich in meat and processed with tools, provided more energy. This surplus fueled a crucial evolutionary trade‑off—a smaller gut in exchange for a much larger, more metabolically expensive brain. This shift also created a new human life strategy involving a long, slow childhood and the ability to store more body fat to support brain development and reproductive success in the unpredictable world of the Ice Age.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 6 - A Very Cultured Species. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

This chapter covers the final biological transition—the origin of our own species, Homo sapiens. While anatomical changes like a globular skull and a smaller face are important, the key argument is that what truly made us “modern” was our unprecedented capacity for culture, language, and symbolic thought. This “software” revolution, more than any physical “hardware” change, allowed early modern humans to innovate, cooperate, and adapt with extraordinary speed, ultimately enabling them to colonize the entire planet.

PART II - Farming and the Industrial Revolution

This section shifts focus from biological evolution to cultural evolution, analyzing how the two greatest transformations of the last 12,000 years have created a profound and ongoing conflict with our Stone Age bodies.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 7 - Progress, Mismatch, and Dysevolution. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

This chapter bridges the book’s two halves by outlining the consequences of having Paleolithic bodies in a post‑Paleolithic world. It fully develops the concepts of evolutionary mismatch and introduces “dysevolution.” Dysevolution is presented as a pernicious feedback loop where cultural innovations are used to treat the symptoms of mismatch diseases rather than their environmental causes, thereby allowing the diseases to persist or even worsen across generations.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 8 - Paradise Lost?. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

The Agricultural Revolution is framed here not as a straightforward step forward but as a “colossal mistake” from the perspective of individual health. While farming produced more food and fueled population growth, it also led to a cascade of mismatch diseases. The argument is that the shift to a low‑variety, starchy diet caused nutritional deficiencies and cavities, while sedentary village life and proximity to livestock unleashed waves of infectious diseases and famines.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 9 - Modern Times, Modern Bodies. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

This chapter explores the paradox of health in the industrial era. On one hand, scientific and sanitation advances solved many of the infectious diseases of the agricultural era, leading to longer lives. On the other hand, the Industrial Revolution created a new set of mismatches by drastically reducing physical labor and introducing highly processed, energy‑dense foods, setting the stage for the modern epidemic of chronic, non‑communicable diseases.

PART III - The Present, the Future

The final part of the book applies an evolutionary lens to the most pressing health crises of our time, diagnosing their deep causes and proposing a new way to think about cultivating a healthier future.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 10 - The Vicious Circle of Too Much. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

This chapter focuses on the quintessential diseases of affluence, which are caused by an excess of energy. It explains the metabolic processes behind obesity, particularly the storage of visceral (belly) fat. The core argument is that modern diets, loaded with rapidly digested sugars and refined carbohydrates, overwhelm our ancient metabolic systems, leading to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic conditions caught in a dysevolutionary cycle.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 11 - Disuse. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

Here, the book examines the opposite problem—diseases that arise from too little of the stimuli our bodies evolved to expect. It explains that our skeletons, muscles, and even our immune systems require physical stress and microbial exposure to develop and maintain proper function. The chapter argues that modern inactivity and hyper‑hygienic lifestyles contribute to diseases of disuse like osteoporosis, weak feet, and a rise in allergies and autoimmune disorders.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 12 - The Hidden Dangers of Novelty and Comfort. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

This chapter addresses mismatch diseases caused by novel behaviors and our innate craving for comfort. It explains how seemingly harmless modern inventions—like supportive shoes, comfortable chairs, and the act of reading for hours—are evolutionarily new. When taken to extremes, these comforts can become harmful, contributing to widespread problems like flat feet, chronic back pain, and myopia, which we then treat with more novel inventions, perpetuating a cycle of dysevolution.

[[Lieberman, D. E. (2013). 13 - Survival of the Fitter. In The Story of the Human Body- Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon Books.]]

The concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s arguments to propose a path forward. It dismisses the idea that natural selection or medical technology alone will solve our modern health crises. Instead, it argues that since we cannot change our genes, we must change our environments. The most effective and humane approach is to apply the logic of evolution to create environments that nudge us—gently but deliberately—toward more walking, better diets, and other behaviors that align with how our bodies were adapted to function. It is a call to actively “cultivate our bodies.”