Summary of Herman Pontzer's Burn

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I was camping with the Hadza, a tribe of hunter-gatherers, in the middle of the African savanna. The sounds of lions woke me up at two in the morning. I was terrified, but I knew that if one had to be eaten by lions, it would be better to be asleep at the time.

#2 The Hadza are a resourceful and badass tribe that lives in northern Tanzania. They are hunter-gatherers, and they have no agriculture or domesticated animals. They acquire their food from the wild landscape around them.

#3 The Hadza people are a tribe in Tanzania that live a primitive lifestyle. They hunt and gather wild foods, and do not use money. They do not have electricity, cars, or other modern conveniences. But they are very resourceful and can hunt and gather food almost anywhere.

#4 The way our bodies burn energy is extremely important for our health and well-being. Our bodies are made up of roughly 37 trillion cells, each of which is humming along like a microscopic factory every second of every day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822522206

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights on Herman Pontzer's Burn

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I was camping with the Hadza, a tribe of hunter-gatherers, in the middle of the African savanna. The sounds of lions woke me up at two in the morning. I was terrified, but I knew that if one had to be eaten by lions, it would be better to be asleep at the time.

#2

The Hadza are a resourceful and badass tribe that lives in northern Tanzania. They are hunter-gatherers, and they have no agriculture or domesticated animals. They acquire their food from the wild landscape around them.

#3

The Hadza people are a tribe in Tanzania that live a primitive lifestyle. They hunt and gather wild foods, and do not use money. They do not have electricity, cars, or other modern conveniences. But they are very resourceful and can hunt and gather food almost anywhere.

#4

The way our bodies burn energy is extremely important for our health and well-being. Our bodies are made up of roughly 37 trillion cells, each of which is humming along like a microscopic factory every second of every day.

#5

The science of energy expenditure has been wrong since the beginning of modern metabolic research around the turn of the twentieth century. We have been taught to think of our bodies as simple engines: we take in fuel in the form of food, and burn it off by revving our engine with exercise.

#6

The new science of human metabolism is changing the way we understand the links between energy expenditure, exercise, diet, and disease. It has come from work with the Hadza and other non-industrialized societies that still remain integrated into their local ecology.

#7

The Hadza’s indifference towards time is shocking to me, as it is a typical American’s concern about the progression of time. We live life in slow motion, and if humans lived like a typical mammal our size, we’d be dead by the age of twenty-five.

#8

The pace of life isn’t some arbitrary and fixed schedule handed down from the heavens. Humans and other primates have exceptionally slow life histories compared to other mammals. We’ve known for decades that humans and other primates have slow life histories because conditions in which species are less likely to be killed early by a predator or other malefactor favor a slower pace of life.

#9

A study was done to see if apes were able to play along with a research study, and it was found that they were able to. Azy, a 250-pound orangutan, was given a thousand-dollar dose of doubly labeled water, and he seemed to be enjoying it.

#10

The idea that humans have a low metabolic rate was first tested in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was proven to be false. The consensus view is that humans and other apes have the same metabolic