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, Herman Pontzer has conducted research that embraces our incredible diversity, documenting the connections among lifestyle, landscape, local adaptations, and health.

Adaptable takes us on a tour of human body. In each chapter, we learn how our bodies navigate an uncertain world: how we grow and mature; how our brains develop and learn; how our hearts, lungs, and digestive systems deliver oxygen and nutrients; how we manage toxins, temperature, and water balance; how we move and reproduce; how our immune system keeps invaders at bay; and how we age and decline. Along the way, we learn how to keep our remarkable bodies healthy, and that the universe of healthy lifestyles is vast (we don’t need the latest fad diet or cleanse!). Crucially, we come to see how understanding our bodies helps us make sense of the big issues we face today, from vaccines to heart disease, IQ to athletic excellence, diets and obesity to sex and gender, and from when life begins to what we can do to live longer and healthier.