The Evolutionary Biology of Human Body Fatness
Thrift and Control

Integrates medical and evolutionary data on the role of body fat in human biology, including the current obesity epidemic.

Jonathan C. K. Wells (Author)

9781108822596, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 June 2020

394 pages
15 x 23 x 2 cm, 0.58 kg

This comprehensive synthesis of current medical and evolutionary literature addresses key questions about the role body fat plays in human biology. It explores how body energy stores are regulated, how they develop over the life-course, what biological functions they serve, and how they may have evolved. There is now substantial evidence that human adiposity is not merely a buffer against the threat of starvation, but is also a resource for meeting the energy costs of growth, reproduction and immune function. As such it may be considered as important in our species evolution as other traits such as bipedalism, large brains, and long life spans and developmental periods. Indeed, adiposity is integrally linked with these other traits, and with our capacity to colonise and inhabit diverse ecosystems. It is because human metabolism is so sensitive to environmental cues that manipulative economic forces are now generating the current obesity epidemic.

1. Introduction
2. Human fatness in broad context
3. The proximate causes of fat deposition
4. The ontogenetic development of adiposity
5. The life-course induction of adiposity
6. The fitness value of fat
7. The evolutionary biology of adipose tissue
8. Adiposity in hominid evolution
9. Adiposity in human evolution
10. The evolution of obesity.

Subject Areas: Human biology [PSX], Evolution [PSAJ], Anthropology [JHM]