Danny Longman
Human athletic paleobiology, life history and energy allocation

Talk Abstract

The use of sport as a conceptual framework offers unprecedented opportunities to improve our understanding of what the body does, shedding new light on our evolutionary trajectory, our capacity for adaptation, and the underlying biological mechanisms. This approach has gained traction over recent years. To date, sport has facilitated exploration not only of the evolutionary history of our species as a whole, but also of human variation and adaptation at the inter-individual and intra-individual levels. In this talk, Danny will discuss how ultra-endurance challenges are being used to provoke functional trade-offs, which is in turn allowing new ground to be broken in the study of life history trade-offs and human adaptability.