Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us

＂A new understanding of how our bodies work, how to keep them healthy, and how our biological diversity unites us rather than divides us. How does the body work-and why does it seem to work so differently for each of us? Why do we grow tall or short, obese or slim? Why do some of us stay healthy despite our bad habits while others who do all the right things fall ill? When we look around the planet, why do people vary in skin color, facial features, stature, body proportions, and disease risk? The answer is both simple and powerful: we’re different because we’re adaptable. Over the past 100,000 years, as humans expanded into every biome on the planet, our bodies were fine-tuned to our local environments. Adaptability is at the heart of being human and the engine of our diversity. Variation isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. As an evolutionary anthropologist working with human populations around the globe, Pontzer’s research embraces our incredible diversity, documenting the connections between lifestyle, landscape, local adaptations, and health＂-- Provided by publisher.

Herman Pontzer is a professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health at Duke University. He is an internationally recognized researcher in human energetics and evolution. Over two decades of research in the field and laboratory, Dr. Pontzer has conducted pathbreaking studies across a range of settings, including fieldwork with Hadza hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania, fieldwork on chimpanzee ecology in the rainforests of Uganda, and metabolic measurements of great apes in zoos and sanctuaries around the globe. Dr. Pontzer’s work has been covered in The New York Times, the BBC, PBS, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, Scientific American, and others. He is the author of Burn (Avery, 2021).