Childbirth is dangerous, with a high risk of complications and death. Humans are generally diurnal, sleeping on average seven to nine hours per day. They can survive for up to eight weeks without food, and three or four days without water. Humans are omnivorous, capable of consuming a wide variety of plant and animal material, and have used fire and other forms of heat to prepare and cook food since the time of H.
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Women are capable of pregnancy, and undergo menopause and become infertile at around the age of 50. At puberty, humans develop secondary sex characteristics. Generally, men have greater body strength and women have a higher body fat percentage. Though humans vary in many traits (such as genetic predispositions and physical features), two humans on average are over 99% similar, with the most genetically diverse populations from Africa. Genes and the environment influence human biological variation in visible characteristics, physiology, disease susceptibility, mental abilities, body size and life span. Humans have continued to expand, with a global population of over 7.9 billion in October 2021. As populations became larger and denser, forms of governance developed within and between communities and a number of civilizations have risen and fallen. The Neolithic Revolution, which began in Southwest Asia around 13,000 years ago, saw the emergence of agriculture and permanent human settlement. For most of history, all humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago in Africa, evolving from Homo heidelbergensis and migrating out of Africa, gradually replacing local populations of archaic humans. Curiosity and the human desire to understand and influence the environment and to explain and manipulate phenomena have motivated humanity's development of science, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other fields of study.Īlthough some scientists equate humans with all members of the genus Homo, in common usage it generally refers to Homo sapiens, the only extant member. Social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, and rituals, which bolster human society. Humans are highly social and tend to live in complex social structures composed of many cooperating and competing groups, from families and kinship networks to political states. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, and language. And finally – provocatively – he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help us nudge, push, and sometimes oblige us to create a more salubrious environment.Humans ( Homo sapiens) are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and large, complex brains. He 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. Lieberman illuminates how these ongoing changes have brought many benefits, but also have created novel conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, resulting in a growing incidence of obesity and new but avoidable diseases, including type 2 diabetes. He elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and has further transformed our bodies during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.
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In a book that illuminates, as never before, the evolutionary story of the human body, Daniel Lieberman deftly examines the major transformations which contributed key adaptations to the body: the advent of bipedalism the shift to a non-fruit based diet the rise of hunting and gathering and our superlative endurance athletic abilities the development of a very large brain and the incipience of modern cultural abilities. A landmark book of popular science, The Story of the Human Body is a lucid, engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years and of how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and the modern world in which we live is fueling the paradox of greater longevity but more chronic disease.