Read Online Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit - Free Book Online Page A

Dart’s counter-hypothesis was advanced by Louis and Mary Leakey’s spectacular Kenyan finds in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and all but confirmed by Donald Johanson’s celebrated discovery of the “Lucy” skeleton and related fossils in Ethiopia in the 1970s. Walking came first.
    Nowadays walking upright is considered to be the Rubicon the evolving species crossed to become hominid, distinct from all other primates and ancestral to human beings. The list of what we eventually got from bipedalism is long and alluring, full of all the gothic arches and elongations of the body. Start with the straight row of toes and high arch of the foot. Go up the long straight walker’s legs to the buttocks, round and protruberant thanks to the massively developed gluteus maximus of walkers, a minor muscle in apes but the largest muscle in the human body. Then go on to the flat stomach, the flexible waist, the straight spine, the low shoulders, the erect head set atop a long neck. The upright body’s various sections are balanced on top of each other like the sections of a pillar, while the weight of quadrupeds’ heads and torsos hangs from their spines like the roadway from a suspension bridge, with a pair of pierlike legs toward either end. The great apes are knuckle-walkers: creatures adapted to life in tropical forests who for the most part move only short distances on the ground between trees, on long forelimbs that give them a kind of diagonal posture. Apes have—when compared to humans—arched backs, no waists, short necks, chests shaped like inverted funnels, protruberant abdomens, scrawny hips and bottoms, bandy legs, and flat feet with opposable big toes.
    When I think about this evolutionary history of walking, I see a small figure, like my companion on the lake bed, only this time it is dawn and the figure is moving toward me, an indecipherable dot in the distance that seems somehow unfamiliar as it becomes distinguishable as an upright figure and finally, when it draws close, is just another walker. But what was that casting a long shadow in the middle distance? Lucy—as they named the small 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974, presuming from various details that it was female—was apelike in many respects; she had little in the way of a waist or neck, short legs, longish arms, and the funnel-like rib cage of an ape. Her pelvis, however, was wide and shallow, and so she had a stable gait withhip joints far apart tapering to close-together knees like humans and unlike chimps (whose narrow hips and far-apart knees make them lurch from side to side when they walk upright). Some say she would have been a terrible runner and not much of a walker. But she walked. This much is certain, and then come the arguments.
    Dozens of scientists have interpreted her bones, reconstructed her flesh, her gait, her sex life, in dozens of different ways and argued over whether she walked well or poorly. Discovery conveys a certain privilege of interpretation, and so Johanson, who worked at the Cleveland Museum, took the bones he found in Hadar, Ethiopia, to his friend Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Cleveland State University and an expert on human locomotion. Lovejoy issued the orthodox verdict. In his book Lucy, Johanson reports that Lovejoy said of the afarensis knee joint he had brought in the year before,
“This is like a modern knee joint. This little midget was fully bipedal.”
    â€œBut could he walk upright?” I persisted.
    â€œMy friend, he could walk upright. Explain to him what a hamburger was and he’d beat you to the nearest McDonald’s nine times out of ten.”
    Johanson’s knee joint came along as the first material support for Lovejoy’s bold theory that bipedalism had begun and been perfected far earlier than anyone else had assumed. The following year, the Lucy skeleton—or the 40 percent of it that was