HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025152 ENDURANCE A Natural History of Exercise and Health By Daniel Lieberman [Proposal; Delivery: April 2019; 120,000 words] Endurance is the new book from Daniel Lieberman, Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and author of The Story of the Human Body, a New York Times bestseller. Lieberman is well known for his unique and unusually integrative approach to research, which combines paleontology, anatomy, physiology and experimental biomechanics. "Endurance," Lieberman writes, "argues that we need to rethink how we think about exercise using the dual lenses of anthropology and evolutionary biology. As the modern word 'exercise' itself implies, people today generally think of physical activity as a pastime or a form of medicine. Most of us spend the majority of the day sitting and then we briefly exercise in our spare time, sometimes for fun, but increasingly to ward off ill health. Yet, until very recently, physical activity was a paradoxically fundamental part of being human: utterly necessary but instinctively avoided. Put simply, we evolved to be reluctant endurance athletes. "This legacy underlies and points to urgently needed solutions for today's exercise dilemma. Everyone knows that exercise is vital for good health, yet the vast majority of Americans and others in the developed world are unable to exercise enough. Our species endured because we had no choice but to be athletes, and if we wish our health to endure as individuals, then we still need to make exercise indispensable today. Rather than thinking of exercise as a 'magic pill' for good health, it is the absence of physical activity, primarily endurance exercise, that accelerates aging and hastens death. Endurance points to a new way of understanding and solving this global problem. "Endurance is the product of a long journey, part intellectual, part physical. Over the last decade I have traversed the globe to observe, often as a part