Episode 19: Being Human - Born and Evolved to Run
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2016
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Humans and our recent ancestors have been accomplished endurance runners for more than a million years. Our evolutionary history as runners partly accounts for why aerobic exercise is such a key component of human health.
In this talk, recorded in July 2016, Daniel Lieberman explores how and why the human body evolved to run long distances.
Daniel Lieberman is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard University. He is a member of the Scientific Executive Committee of The Leakey Foundation.
His research is on how and why the human body is the way it is, with particular foci on the origins of bipedalism, how humans became endurance runners, and the evolution of the highly unusual human head. Lieberman has published 3 books and more than 100 articles. His latest books are The Evolution of the Human Head, and The Story of the Human Body.
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Theme music by Henry Nagle. Closing credit song by Lee Rosevere.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:10.4 | We're back with another live episode from the Being Human event series. This talk was recorded in July |
| 0:16.6 | 2016 just before the San Francisco Marathon, And it's about how humans are adapted for long |
| 0:22.4 | distance running. Our speaker is Daniel Lieberman. Dr. Lieberman is a professor in the Department |
| 0:29.2 | of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He's also a Leaky Foundation grantee |
| 0:34.8 | and a member of our scientific executive committee. |
| 0:38.4 | His research focuses on how and why our bodies are the way they are. |
| 0:42.5 | He's especially interested in how and why humans are so good at long distance running. |
| 0:47.8 | He's the author of over 100 scientific papers and several books. |
| 0:52.1 | His most recent book is called The Story of the Human Body. Here's Daniel Lieberman, |
| 0:57.0 | recorded live on stage at Public Works in San Francisco. |
| 1:04.2 | So I'm here to talk about the marathon and running, and I'm delighted to see that some of you |
| 1:09.8 | are planning to run. How many of you are thinking about maybe running in the future at some point? Okay, good. How many, like, there's no way you'd ever want to run a marathon at all in your entire lives. Actually, that's the smallest number of hands that have gone up. That's good. And I'm guessing a lot of people didn't raise their hands to any of those questions, which is fine. I would like to start by thinking about the kind of world that we live in, |
| 1:32.3 | just to remind us that the 21st century, if you just watch the news, you realize what a strange world it is today. |
| 1:40.3 | But as somebody who studies the evolution of the body, I'd like to remind us all that |
| 1:45.2 | the way in which we use our bodies today is really profoundly abnormal from an evolutionary |
| 1:49.1 | perspective. So the average American, for example, today watches about five hours of TV. |
| 1:55.2 | We all watch that, right? Yeah, exactly. The average American is about 23 pounds overweight. The average American throws |
| 2:02.5 | out about a half a pound of food every single day, which is an extraordinary amount of food. |
| 2:08.0 | The average American walks less than three miles a day, which is actually about what a |
| 2:13.1 | chimpanzee walks, by the way. The average American wears shoes. I can see everybody here is wearing shoes, |
| 2:18.2 | myself included. We eat breakfast from a box, which if you think about it is a really strange thing. |
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