Early humans – the ones who walked 6 miles a day to find roots and animals to eat – did not exercise. That is, they did not set aside an hour here or there to “get in shape” for hunting and gathering. Their current-day counterparts, clans in the isolated wilds of East Africa, Indonesia, central America, and the Amazon, continue that life-style, one of spending three to four hours a day finding or preparing food, eight hours sleeping, and the rest devoted to sitting. They talk, work on crafts, or simply lounge. But they do not train.
Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard professor of evolutionary anthropology, in his new book, Exercised, asks the question, “If we did not evolve to exercise, why do we?” He opens his quest in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, watching the 2012 Ironman World Championship. Supremely fit endurance athletes from all over the globe gather annually to test themselves, having trained – exercised – 20 hours a week for months, sometimes years, to swim, bike and run for eight to seventeen hours, collapsing at the finish. He wonders, not why they come, but rather how they are able to do something their ancestors 6000 generations ago would never contemplate.
He outlines the metabolism of inactivity, the physiology of senescence (growing old), the mechanism of muscle contraction and the effect of exercise on disease in his eclectic review of how and why we exercise. Along the way, he considers the importance of being lazy, why sitting may not be the new smoking, and the value of sleep. Moving on from inactivity, he analyzes speed, strength, and power. A runner himself, he reports on his time with runners in Mexico’s Copper Canyon (the Tarahumara) and the East African highlands. He observes a UFC cage match, considering how we may have evolved to be peaceful except in reaction to threat.
Running in the 2018 Boston Marathon, a notoriously rainy and windy affair, he wonders why he kept going, what possessed him to endure such conditions for nothing more than bragging rights. While watching an aboriginal all-night celebration, featuring hours of dancing to exhaustion, he notes the similarity between dance and running. Both involve hoping from one foot to another. Dancing, found in all cultures, is both a ritual and means of social cohesion. The communal nature of dancing leads to his final observations: exercise is best done with a goal, in the company of others.
Lieberman has drawn together studies from a wide-range of scientific disciplines, the common thread of exercise is woven into a picture of how modern humans can use skills and attitudes inherited from ancient peoples to live a long and healthy life. And, he answers the question which vexes all endurance athletes: Why don’t I want to go out and train today? Because we weren’t “born to run”. We are born to be lazy.