On Humans Encore: Walking Towards the Human Condition (with Jeremy De Silva)
Apologies for the slow start to 2026! Something big is coming soon. Stay tuned for the announcement next week.
Whilst waiting, you can enjoy one of my all-time favourites from the archives.
A lot of the recent episodes have mentioned the impact of bipedalism in the human story, but the remarks have hardly done justice to the depth of the matter.
Jeremy DeSilva did it justice.
Enjoy!
ORIGINAL SHOW NOTES
Humans are odd in many ways. But perhaps the oddest of our features is our upright posture. We walk on two legs. And we are the only mammal to do so.
So why do we walk upright? And why does it matter?
Jeremy DeSilva is a fossil expert and a professor of paleoanthropology at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of a remarkable book, aptly titled First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human
DeSilva’s treatment of the subject is sweeping: while tracing the journey of human posture, he draws remarkable links between bipedalism and many facets of the human condition, from difficult births to complex language and from lower back pains to the beauty of friendships.
In this episode, we talk about questions such as:
- What Darwin got right and wrong about the role of walking in human evolution
- When and why did we start walking upright?
- Why the common picture of human evolution is wrong - and what would be a better picture
- Why walking makes us fragile
- How our ancestors survived bone fractures - and why this is a big deal
- Why is human birth so difficult
- Why walking is so good for us: introducing the “myokines”
- What studying the human journey has taught DeSilva about our species
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Names mentioned
Charles Darwin / Ian Tattersall / Donald Johanson / Mary Leakey / Sherwood Washburn / Richard Wrangham (ep 21) / Kristen Hawkes (ep 6) / Holly Dunsworth / Daniel Lieberman
Mentioned hominin species
Sahelanthropus / Ardipithecus / Australopithecus (e.g. Lucy) / Homo habilis / Homo erectus / Homo sapiens