A strange stroll made a strange species

摘要

No other animal moves the way we do. That's awfully strange. Even among other two-legged species, none amble about with a straight back and a gait that, technically, is just a form of controlled falling. Our bipedalism doesn't just set us apart, paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva posits; it's what makes us human. There's no shortage of books that propose this or that feature - tool use or self-awareness, for example - as the very definition of humankind. But much of our supposed uniqueness doesn't stand up to this tradition. In First Steps, DeSilva takes a slightly different approach. Our way of walking, he argues, set off an array of consequences that inform our peculiar evolutionary history.