![]() Baggish and other researchers scanned the hearts and measured blood pressures of young, male distance runners and football players at Harvard, subsistence farmers in Mexico, and 40 sedentary but healthy young men in Boston. Lieberman says, so the best way to learn about their evolution would be not through excavations but via comparative appraisals of our organs with those of our erstwhile relatives. We humans, on the other hand, tend to be built for endurance and frequent, moderate physical activity, he says, with a fossil record showing gradual changes in our skeletons likely caused by and promoting plenty of walking and occasional distance running as we hunted and gathered. But they rapidly clamber up and down trees and grapple during fights. Lieberman says, except for a mile or two in search of food. Aaron Baggish and the exercise physiologist Robert Shave, from the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus.Ĭhimps and gorillas, whether in the wild or zoos, rarely run or even walk much, Dr. This comparison would be expected to reflect how our lives diverged over the millenniums, says Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and one of the study’s principal co-authors, together with the Harvard cardiologist Dr. So, for the new study, which was published in September in PNAS, scientists from Harvard University and other institutions decided to compare, for the first time, the looks and inner workings of human hearts and those of our closest primate cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas. Recently, I wrote about a study showing that the hearts of elite swimmers and runners differ from one another slightly in shape and function and differ substantially from the hearts of those who aren’t athletes.īut until now, researchers had not examined whether and how this changing of the heart, known as its plasticity, might have played out during our evolution as a species and what that process could mean for our heart health today. They change in response to the demands placed on them. In general, mammalian hearts are quite malleable. The findings likewise suggest that not getting enough of the right kind of exercise could mean that our hearts start to look just a little bit less human, and could impact our long-term health. The study, which involved scanning the hearts of untamed primates and a wide variety of men, indicates that hearts adapt in telling ways to the needs of their owners. No chimpanzees or gorillas are in training for a fall marathon - a reflection, perhaps, of the ways in which the hearts of apes and men look and function as they do, according to a major new study of the health and evolution of cardiac muscles. ![]()
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