A landmark book of popular science—a lucid, engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years and of how increasingly the disparity between the evolutionary design of our ""hunter-gatherer"" bodies and the world in which we live has occasioned a crisis of ""dysevolution.""

In a book that illuminates, as never before, the evolutionary story of the human body, Daniel Lieberman deftly examines the five 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 of the species as comprised of superlative endurance athletes; the development of a very large brain; and the incipience of modern cultural abilities. He elucidates the difference between biological and cultural evolution, the latter of which, though largely beneficial, has created conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted (resulting in a growing incidence of new but avoidable diseases, including diabetes and obesity). He accounts for ""dysevolution,"" the pernicious dynamic whereby only the symptoms rather than the causes of these maladies are treated, and finally—provocatively—he advocates the use of evolutionary information to replicate, sometimes coercively, a more salubrious environment.

(With charts and line drawings throughout.)