First Steps: How Upright Walking Made us Human-A Review

Well, its time for another book review! There are just so many great books out there that have been published in the last year, let alone decade and beyond. Recently I created a “Top 5 Books” list, that you can view here. But today we are going to be talking about one book in particular, and a mighty fine book at that.

This book, like many books on Human Evolution goes over the basics of Human Origins, explaining our ever so complicated braided stream of a family of hominids all the way to modern day runners. The thing that this book does so differently than other books on Human Origins, is that it is almost exclusively viewed by one point of view. And that is that of Upright Walking.

Bipedalism is something that we only find in Modern Humans, we are not the only humans or humanoid species to do it, not by far, but we are the last mammal to do so. This, to us at least, makes us feel special, we think it makes us unique and different from all other beasts of the land.

And maybe it does. There are many theories on how Bipedalism first came about, whether we started in the trees, or eventually adapted to move in and out of them, its a complicated story. But Jerry does a great job of exploring multiple hypothesis without showing bias towards one or another. For the most part, there are some ideas out there that are just too other worldly to consider.

Jerry DeSilva goes to great lengths to help the reader understand that we, are a product of our biology, which has evolved over millions of years to make us bipedal. While he does not know the answer that, or at least not yet, he definitely is on the right track, and is brining all of us along the journey with him.

“First Steps” by Jeremy DeSilva is a very digestible, intellectual and well sourced book on how upright walking made us human. You will learn a lot from this book, about things you may or may not have been expecting. But as with his other recent title released, “A Most Interesting Problem, What Darwin’s Decent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution” we begin to see where Professor Desilva’s mind is, and it is a glorious place to be.

Do yourself a favor, if you want to learn about why we walk upright, what makes us different from other animals, or plainly what makes us Human, grab your copy here.

Check out our interview with Prof. DeSilva here!