We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in mud huts
rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than play football or
did we? Are our bodies and brains truly at odds with modern life?
Although it may seem as though we have barely had time to shed our
hunter-gatherer legacy, biologist Marlene Zuk reveals that the
story is not so simple. Popular theories about how our ancestors
lived and why we should emulate them are often based on
speculation, not scientific evidence.
Armed with a razor-sharp wit and brilliant, eye-opening
research, Zuk takes us to the cutting edge of biology to show that
evolution can work much faster than was previously realized,
meaning that we are not biologically the same as our caveman
ancestors. Contrary to what the glossy magazines would have us
believe, we do not enjoy potato chips because they crunch just like
the insects our forebears snacked on. And women don t go into
shoe-shopping frenzies because their prehistoric foremothers
gathered resources for their clans. As Zuk compellingly argues,
such beliefs incorrectly assume that we re stuck finished evolving
and have been for tens of thousands of years. She draws on
fascinating evidence that examines everything from adults ability
to drink milk to the texture of our ear wax to show that we ve
actually never stopped evolving. Our nostalgic visions of an ideal
evolutionary past in which we ate, lived, and reproduced as we were
meant to fail to recognize that we were never perfectly suited to
our environment. Evolution is about change, and every organism is
full of trade-offs.
From debunking the caveman diet to unraveling gender
stereotypes, Zuk delivers an engrossing analysis of widespread
paleofantasies and the scientific evidence that undermines them,
all the while broadening our understanding of our origins and what
they can really tell us about our present and our future."
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