Herman Pontzer (on evolutionary anthropology)

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Armchair Umbrella

Tv & Film, Music, Comedy

4.6 • 68.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2025

⏱️ 114 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Herman Pontzer (Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us) is an evolutionary anthropologist, author, and associate professor at Duke University. Herman joins the Armchair Expert to discuss growing up at the end of a dirt road in a house his dad built, unpacking the dark history of anthropometry, and the ewok chapter of human evolution. Herman and Dax talk about why the brain is the most expensive organ in the body, how the first full human skeleton found being named after a Beatles song, and why people burn more calories being anxious. Herman explains the hockey stick inflection point of intelligence when we began hunting and gathering, why research on early humans debunks the paleo diet, and the story of the guy that accidentally killed the world's oldest living organism.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.
0:06.5	Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:10.0	Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.
0:13.7	Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.
0:16.3	I'm Hermium Permian.
0:17.6	I'm showing by my mom.
0:19.5	Hi, Mom.
0:20.7	Hi, son. You're not going to believe this, Miss Monica. Tell me. Good friend of mine's here. Who?
0:26.8	Herman Poncer.
0:29.1	Hermann, did you make him up? No, that's really our guess. Herman Ponzer.
0:33.3	Wow. Herman Ponzer.
0:35.1	Herman Ponzer.
0:36.9	What a, maybe my favorite name we've had for a guest.
0:39.4	Really good name.
0:40.7	A really cool guy.
0:42.0	Incredibly cool.
0:42.8	Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University.
0:47.4	He's an internationally recognized researcher in human energetics and evolution.
0:52.9	His previous book, which is great, is called Burn Some Shocking Ways We Consume Calories.
0:59.8	We talked about it, and it was really interesting.
1:02.0	Yeah, we did a little section on Burn.
1:03.5	And then his new book, Adaptable, How Your Unique Body Really Works, and Why our biology unites us.
	...

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