丹尼尔·E·利伯曼

丹尼尔·埃里克·利伯曼（英语：Daniel Eric Lieberman，1964年6月3日—）是一名美国古人类学家，哈佛大学生物学教授，2009年获搞笑诺贝尔物理学奖，主要作品有《人体故事：进化、健康和疾病》（The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease）等。

Daniel E. Lieberman (born June 3, 1964) is a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University, where he is the Edwin M Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences, and Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He is best known for his research on running, the evolution of the human head and the human body, and for studying how human evolutionary history, especially in terms of physical activity and diet, can improve human health.

Biography

Lieberman grew up in Connecticut and Rhode Island. After attending Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island, Lieberman attended Harvard University, where he received his B.A. summa cum laude in biological anthropology (1986) and joint M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in biological anthropology and archaeology (1993). He also received an M.Phil. (1987) from Cambridge University, where he was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow. Following his Ph.D., he was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1993–1996). He then taught at Rutgers University (1995–1998) and the George Washington University (1998–2001) before becoming a professor at Harvard University in 2001.

In 2009, Lieberman became the founding chair of Harvard University's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He served as chair from 2009 to 2018, and from 2022 to 2025. In addition to being director of the Skeletal Biology and Biomechanics Laboratory at Harvard, Lieberman is on the curatorial board of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, a member of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and the Scientific Executive Committee of the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation.

Scientific work

Lieberman has mostly studied how and why the human body evolved to be the way it is, especially in regards to physical activity and diet, and how that evolutionary history is relevant for health.

Evolution of the human head

For the first half of his career, Lieberman's research primarily focused on integrating comparative and fossil anatomy, experimental biomechanics, and developmental biology to explore hominin craniofacial function and evolution. He summarized much of this research in his 2011 book, The Evolution of the Human Head. A key contribution was to show that many of the features used to classify Homo sapiens result from a more retracted, smaller face which causes a more flexed cranial base that in turn sets up a more globular cranial vault. In other papers, Lieberman with colleagues showed how this integrated configuration has implications for a range of functions and adaptations including speech, swallowing, and head balance during locomotion.

Lieberman has also worked on many other aspects of hominin craniofacial evolution. Of particular note, he worked with Michel Brunet and colleagues to describe and analyze the oldest known hominin species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, and with David Pilbeam to argue that the first hominins likely evolved from a last common ancestor with chimpanzees that largely resembled extant chimpanzees. Lieberman also published on the challenges of using craniofacial data to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among hominins, and on the evolutionary biomechanics of mastication, including a study with Katherine Zink showing that mechanically processing meat and underground storage organs with Oldowan stone tools considerably increases the efficiency and effectiveness of chewing and likely made possible selection for reduced tooth size in the genus Homo.