Just Finished Reading Exercised by Daniel Lieberman

Daniel Lieberman's academic title is "paleoanthropologist", a mouthful that I'm confident he's gotten quite well at enunciating...I, though, have some catching up to do.  I first saw him in a YouTube interview on the excellent channel Diary of a CEO and was impressed enough to check out his book Exercised from my public library.  Its premise resounds like Lieberman's interview: humankind evolved not to engage in exercise, but to avoid it. He posits his theory based on his academic research living among different ongoing hunter-gatherer cultures in various parts of the world.  There the people's lives are doubtless physically strenuous, but only when their necessities, such as hunting, demand it.  Otherwise, they seem quite lazy, sitting around and definitely not jogging or weightlifting.  Lieberman says that this is why people in more "advanced" technology-based cultures (such as presumably yours and mine) need to intentionally move our bodies even when labor-saving devices can do most of the physical work for us.  He believes that the advancement of the species through evolution is focused on getting the individual successfully past reproductive age, beyond which their survival into old age becomes more extraneous to the process.  But by assigning special social roles to the elderly that benefit the group's survival, they, too, can achieve long and healthy life spans.  Daniel Lieberman is a big advocate for both resistance and aerobic fitness training, and he himself is a long-distance runner. He also has something to say about the very passive way of sitting for long stretches of time in "advanced" cultures as opposed to the more squatting, fidgety way he observed in his field work of the more "primitive" peoples...our ways lower longevity. I liked both this book of his and his online interview.  Check it out if you have the time or inclination...