Chapter 1: The 200-Million-Year Warm-Up
You think of yourself as a person. Evolution thinks of you as a mammal. And the story of your body starts 230 million years ago with a shrew-like creature hiding from dinosaurs.
◆ Key Insights
One adaptation -- warm blood -- cascaded into a complete redesign: four-chambered heart, bigger brain, faster metabolism
Your ancestors hid in the dark for 160 million years, which is why you dream, why your nose outperforms a lizard's, and why your eyes are worse than an eagle's
Your ability to see the color red is a 55-million-year-old fruit-foraging adaptation from the Eocene canopy
65% of humans who can't digest dairy aren't disordered -- they're running the mammalian default. Lactose tolerance is the mutation
What medicine calls 'normal' is often modern. What it calls 'disorder' is often ancestral
Read the full chapter to discover how 200 million years of mammalian evolution still dictate what your body needs today.
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