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First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human
In First Steps, paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva explores how unusual and extraordinary this seemingly ordinary ability is. A seven-million-year journey to the very origins of the human lineage, First Steps shows how upright walking was a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human—from our technological abilities, our thirst for exploration, our use of language–and may have laid the foundation for our species’ traits of compassion, empathy, and altruism. Moving from developmental psychology labs to ancient fossil sites throughout Africa and Eurasia, DeSilva brings to life our adventure walking on two legs. First Steps examines how walking upright helped us rise above all over species on this planet.
First Steps includes an eight-page color photo insert.
First Steps includes an eight-page color photo insert.
352 pages, ebook
First published April 6, 2021
165 people are currently reading
2457 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 181 reviews
July 29, 2021
I have some notes, but basically this one just never kept my interest. It came due, and I doubt I'll try again. I read about half, and that was around 2.5 stars. There is some interesting stuff. Just not enough to make me care to check it out again. I didn't much like the author's writing style. Minority opinion. I've gotten pickier about spending time on pop-science books that don't click for me. I found out how interesting paleo-podiatry was for me. Not very!
NY Times gave it a good review: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/bo...
NY Times gave it a good review: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/bo...
January 26, 2022
When I blaze through a book, it speaks volumes on the quality of the writing. First Steps took me around three hours of focused reading to complete, and I loved every bit of it.
Jeremy DeSilva specializes in the foot and ankle bones of early hominids. Using fossils of our ancient relatives and ancestors, DeSilva weaves a tale of how and why we became bipedal. It doesn’t seem too difficult at first blush, being bipedal allows Humans to use tools. Images and movies both show support for something like this happening. However, DeSilva finds the truth to be more complicated than that.
First off, is bipedalism really an improvement? Humans are slow compared to quadrupeds and to other bipeds. We are champions at moving for long distances, this is undeniable. The immediate benefits don’t crop up from that, though. Not to mention our soft and sensitive feet are easily injured. Granted, if a chimp walks on two legs, it quickly tires itself out because it’s not built to do that.
So then, DeSilva posits the idea of us coming from the woods rather than the savannah. All of this review is from my memory, written on a phone one hour after I finished the book. Please excuse my inaccuracies or errors. I might return to this review later and edit some of it.
Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
Jeremy DeSilva specializes in the foot and ankle bones of early hominids. Using fossils of our ancient relatives and ancestors, DeSilva weaves a tale of how and why we became bipedal. It doesn’t seem too difficult at first blush, being bipedal allows Humans to use tools. Images and movies both show support for something like this happening. However, DeSilva finds the truth to be more complicated than that.
First off, is bipedalism really an improvement? Humans are slow compared to quadrupeds and to other bipeds. We are champions at moving for long distances, this is undeniable. The immediate benefits don’t crop up from that, though. Not to mention our soft and sensitive feet are easily injured. Granted, if a chimp walks on two legs, it quickly tires itself out because it’s not built to do that.
So then, DeSilva posits the idea of us coming from the woods rather than the savannah. All of this review is from my memory, written on a phone one hour after I finished the book. Please excuse my inaccuracies or errors. I might return to this review later and edit some of it.
Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
February 24, 2025
Some people seem to have been born for certain professions. I have known those who say they were meant to be engineers, or pilots, or chefs. If you are detail oriented and willing to spend part of your life crawling around in the dirt under an equatorial sun, you might have what it takes to be a paleoanthropologist. And though the author of this book appears normal enough, the profession seems to attract oddballs: people who are secretive to the point of paranoia, hostile to their colleagues and willing to publicly call them idiots, and ready to put their personal reputation ahead of the good of the community by locking away finds for years to study them. On any given day a new discovery has the potential to re-write the story of human origins, but before it is accepted the paleoanthropology world is sure to divide into hostile camps, some saying it is a human ancestor, some that it is an extinct species of ape, and some that the evidence is insufficient to support a conclusion.
Most books I’ve read on human evolution seem to circle around these personality types. In one, the bickering among the scientists almost overshadowed the story of the bones. In another a proposal questioning the location of hominin origins led to the researcher being blackballed from publishing. In this book a scientist in possession of important fossils shows them to the author but refuses to let him photograph or measure them, and when asked why replies that no one tells him what to do. I would not want to spend time in a room with these people, but fortunately they’re not all like that and most of those the author talked with were willing to share their fossils and their knowledge.
When you hear about human evolution you almost always read that our ancestors split from the line that would become chimpanzees and bonobos 5-7 million years ago, although occasionally this is pushed back as far as 12 million. First Steps quotes Dr. Todd Disotell from NYU, who asserts that modern tools capable of sequencing large numbers of proteins from different species confidently narrow things down to 6 million plus or minus 500,000. And Homo sapiens didn’t just evolve one day and march off to their own destiny; they continued to live and breed with other types of hominins for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and there were a number of different species back then.
Humans are almost invariably described as having evolved from an “ape-like” ancestor, which evokes images of a hairy, hunched, knuckle-walker much closer to a modern ape than a human. This book shows that bipedalism goes back a very long way, past Australopithecus, the genus which preceded Homo, and likely much further. Therefore, our now-vanished ancestors may very well have walked upright just as we do, and knuckle-walking was the later evolved trait.
There are other considerations, of course, because being able to stand upright is not the same as walking on two legs. Even modern apes can stand to carry things or look around, but only do so temporarily. This complicates the analysis of ancient bones, especially the all important question of Human Ancestor or Evolutionary Dead End?
The standard narrative is that humans evolved from Homo erectus in Africa 200,000-300,000 years ago, although proposing any family tree to a paleoanthropologist is an invitation to a knife fight. Not only are we newcomers, but we have a very short pedigree. “The oldest Australopithecus fossils, from lakeshore sediments in Kenya and woodland soils in Ethiopia, are 4.2 million years old. The youngest, found in caves in South Africa, are about 1 million years old. In those 3 million years, Australopithecus diversified into many different kinds. In fact, scientists have named over a dozen.” Three million years is an astonishing length of time. Not only did they outlive most of the species that descended from them, including H. habilis, the predecessor of Erectus, but they overlapped with Erectus for a million years.
Homo erectus evolved about two million years ago, migrated out of Africa and across Europe and Asia, from England to Java and northern China, and gave rise to such species as the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and others, those known from fossils and those whose existence is theorized from ghostly traces in modern DNA. Erectus was another long-lived species, with the latest fossils only about 100,000 years old.
Changes were coming. Walking on two legs freed hands to carry food, tools, babies, or weapons, bringing our ancestors down from the trees and turning them from scavengers into hunters, and that protein-rich diet is believed to have been a factor in bigger brains, “Between 2 million and 1 million years ago, the average hominin brain roughly doubled in size,” and those big brains increased intelligence, social development, and hunting skills, creating a positive feedback loop that would eventually lead to our 1350cc noggins.
The book is a good mix of hard science and stories of explorers and their exploits. I got the willies just thinking about the women who squeezed through a seven inch opening in a cave deep underground to uncover thousands of Homo Naledi fossils. There are discussions of toes and ankle joints, of foot arches and muscle attachment points. To someone skilled in the field a single toe bone can reveal a great deal about the person it came from.
Science is an inductive pursuit which involves gathering as much evidence as possible from different sources and developing a narrative to explain it. The problem with induction is that you can create an explanation which is simple, elegant, comprehensive – and wrong, but that’s how science works. Even errors can be helpful if they point the way forward.
In the case of human fossils a scenario is developed from bits and pieces of bones (outside of the South African caves almost all fossils are found in fragments), along with climate information from the layers where they were found, any tools or other artifacts in the area, and knowledge from other finds. A good example of this inductive process is the attempt to answer the question of when we began to wear shoes. It had to be before we entered the frozen north, but can we narrow things down a bit? Possibly. An analysis of foot bones shows that they were thicker in early Sapiens, but have since become thinner – perhaps from wearing shoes? A site in China with thinner toes is about 40,000 years old. It’s not proof, but nonetheless makes for an interesting hypothesis and an avenue for further research.
The author also does a good job finding examples to illustrate his points, reminding us, for instance, that “For 97 percent of our species’ history, and for 99 percent of the time that bipedal hominins have walked the earth, we have been nomadic hunters and gatherers.” And when comparing the brain sizes of early humans, “The brains of the earliest hominins, Sahelanthropus and Ardipithecus, were about the size of the average chimpanzee brain – 375 cubic centimeters (cc), or slightly larger than the volume of a can of soda.” Later on he points out that human newborns have brains about 370 cc. A twelve ounce can of soda is 355.
Walking on two legs is a kind of controlled falling. We do it effortlessly when we don’t think about it, but spend too much time trying to analyze the process and you may end up in a heap on the ground. Sounds funny, but there is a serious side to controlled falling, “According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 35,000 Americans die annually from falling – nearly the same number who die in car accidents.”
Once the author has established the history of bipedalism, the last chapters of the book look into some of the implications. Walking on two legs changed the shape of women’s pelvises, making birth more complicated and more dangerous, and unlike chimpanzees, who usually give birth alone in a secluded place, from early on hominin births probably required the presence of helpers.
Childbirth is still a complicated and sometimes dangerous activity:
The United States, with it dysfunctional healthcare system, does not fare well compared to other countries, with about 700 women dying each year in childbirth, about 1 in every 5000 births, “making America the forty-sixth most dangerous country in the world for a woman to give birth – a bit better than Qatar and a bit worse than Uruguay. Today, American women are 50 percent more likely to die in childbirth than their mothers were.”
First Steps is a book for anyone with an interest in human evolution. Walking upright was much more than just heaving ourselves to our feet and heading off into the future; it was a key step to making us the humans we are today.
Most books I’ve read on human evolution seem to circle around these personality types. In one, the bickering among the scientists almost overshadowed the story of the bones. In another a proposal questioning the location of hominin origins led to the researcher being blackballed from publishing. In this book a scientist in possession of important fossils shows them to the author but refuses to let him photograph or measure them, and when asked why replies that no one tells him what to do. I would not want to spend time in a room with these people, but fortunately they’re not all like that and most of those the author talked with were willing to share their fossils and their knowledge.
When you hear about human evolution you almost always read that our ancestors split from the line that would become chimpanzees and bonobos 5-7 million years ago, although occasionally this is pushed back as far as 12 million. First Steps quotes Dr. Todd Disotell from NYU, who asserts that modern tools capable of sequencing large numbers of proteins from different species confidently narrow things down to 6 million plus or minus 500,000. And Homo sapiens didn’t just evolve one day and march off to their own destiny; they continued to live and breed with other types of hominins for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and there were a number of different species back then.
Humans are almost invariably described as having evolved from an “ape-like” ancestor, which evokes images of a hairy, hunched, knuckle-walker much closer to a modern ape than a human. This book shows that bipedalism goes back a very long way, past Australopithecus, the genus which preceded Homo, and likely much further. Therefore, our now-vanished ancestors may very well have walked upright just as we do, and knuckle-walking was the later evolved trait.
There are other considerations, of course, because being able to stand upright is not the same as walking on two legs. Even modern apes can stand to carry things or look around, but only do so temporarily. This complicates the analysis of ancient bones, especially the all important question of Human Ancestor or Evolutionary Dead End?
The standard narrative is that humans evolved from Homo erectus in Africa 200,000-300,000 years ago, although proposing any family tree to a paleoanthropologist is an invitation to a knife fight. Not only are we newcomers, but we have a very short pedigree. “The oldest Australopithecus fossils, from lakeshore sediments in Kenya and woodland soils in Ethiopia, are 4.2 million years old. The youngest, found in caves in South Africa, are about 1 million years old. In those 3 million years, Australopithecus diversified into many different kinds. In fact, scientists have named over a dozen.” Three million years is an astonishing length of time. Not only did they outlive most of the species that descended from them, including H. habilis, the predecessor of Erectus, but they overlapped with Erectus for a million years.
Homo erectus evolved about two million years ago, migrated out of Africa and across Europe and Asia, from England to Java and northern China, and gave rise to such species as the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and others, those known from fossils and those whose existence is theorized from ghostly traces in modern DNA. Erectus was another long-lived species, with the latest fossils only about 100,000 years old.
Changes were coming. Walking on two legs freed hands to carry food, tools, babies, or weapons, bringing our ancestors down from the trees and turning them from scavengers into hunters, and that protein-rich diet is believed to have been a factor in bigger brains, “Between 2 million and 1 million years ago, the average hominin brain roughly doubled in size,” and those big brains increased intelligence, social development, and hunting skills, creating a positive feedback loop that would eventually lead to our 1350cc noggins.
The book is a good mix of hard science and stories of explorers and their exploits. I got the willies just thinking about the women who squeezed through a seven inch opening in a cave deep underground to uncover thousands of Homo Naledi fossils. There are discussions of toes and ankle joints, of foot arches and muscle attachment points. To someone skilled in the field a single toe bone can reveal a great deal about the person it came from.
Science is an inductive pursuit which involves gathering as much evidence as possible from different sources and developing a narrative to explain it. The problem with induction is that you can create an explanation which is simple, elegant, comprehensive – and wrong, but that’s how science works. Even errors can be helpful if they point the way forward.
In the case of human fossils a scenario is developed from bits and pieces of bones (outside of the South African caves almost all fossils are found in fragments), along with climate information from the layers where they were found, any tools or other artifacts in the area, and knowledge from other finds. A good example of this inductive process is the attempt to answer the question of when we began to wear shoes. It had to be before we entered the frozen north, but can we narrow things down a bit? Possibly. An analysis of foot bones shows that they were thicker in early Sapiens, but have since become thinner – perhaps from wearing shoes? A site in China with thinner toes is about 40,000 years old. It’s not proof, but nonetheless makes for an interesting hypothesis and an avenue for further research.
The author also does a good job finding examples to illustrate his points, reminding us, for instance, that “For 97 percent of our species’ history, and for 99 percent of the time that bipedal hominins have walked the earth, we have been nomadic hunters and gatherers.” And when comparing the brain sizes of early humans, “The brains of the earliest hominins, Sahelanthropus and Ardipithecus, were about the size of the average chimpanzee brain – 375 cubic centimeters (cc), or slightly larger than the volume of a can of soda.” Later on he points out that human newborns have brains about 370 cc. A twelve ounce can of soda is 355.
Walking on two legs is a kind of controlled falling. We do it effortlessly when we don’t think about it, but spend too much time trying to analyze the process and you may end up in a heap on the ground. Sounds funny, but there is a serious side to controlled falling, “According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 35,000 Americans die annually from falling – nearly the same number who die in car accidents.”
Once the author has established the history of bipedalism, the last chapters of the book look into some of the implications. Walking on two legs changed the shape of women’s pelvises, making birth more complicated and more dangerous, and unlike chimpanzees, who usually give birth alone in a secluded place, from early on hominin births probably required the presence of helpers.
Childbirth is still a complicated and sometimes dangerous activity:
Worldwide, nearly 300,000 women and 1 million babies die annually in childbirth….Maternal mortality is particularly high where child-bride practices are common and girls give birth before their bodies are done growing. According to a 2019 United Nations Human Rights Council report, it is the leading cause of death for fifteen-to-nineteen-year-old girls in developing nations. In countries where the average marriage age for women is twenty years or more, the maternal mortality rate averages 1 in every 1,500 live births. But in countries where the average marriage age is less than twenty, the average maternal mortality rate is an alarming 1 in every 200 live births. That’s 7.5 times greater.
The United States, with it dysfunctional healthcare system, does not fare well compared to other countries, with about 700 women dying each year in childbirth, about 1 in every 5000 births, “making America the forty-sixth most dangerous country in the world for a woman to give birth – a bit better than Qatar and a bit worse than Uruguay. Today, American women are 50 percent more likely to die in childbirth than their mothers were.”
First Steps is a book for anyone with an interest in human evolution. Walking upright was much more than just heaving ourselves to our feet and heading off into the future; it was a key step to making us the humans we are today.
April 30, 2021
يسألني الناس أحيانًا متى سيجد العلماء الحلقة المفقودة بين القردة والبشر. أقول لهم أننا لدينا هذه الحلقة بالفعل.
يفترض مفهوم الحلقة المفقودة أنه يجب أن يكون هناك دليل في السجل الأحفوري لحيوان لم يكن إنسانًا وليس قردًا ولكنه كان يمتلك خصائص كليهما. في عام 1891 ، كان عالم التشريح الهولندي يوجين دوبوا يبحث عن حفريات على طول نهر سولو في جزيرة جاوا الإندونيسية. استعاد هو وفريقه ضرسًا من أشباه البشر ، وأعلى جمجمة ، وعظمة في الساق. أشارت الساق إلى أن أشباه البشر كانوا ذو قدمين ، وأن سعة الدماغ في الجمجمة تبلغ 915 سم مكعب. لا يوجد إنسان بالغ اليوم لديه دماغ بهذا الحجم ، ولا يوجد قرد لديه دماغ بهذا الحجم. في الواقع ، حجم دماغ الجمجمة تقريبًا في منتصف المسافة بين متوسط حجم دماغ الشمبانزي ودماغ الإنسان العادي : الرابط المفقود.
أطلق دوبوا على اكتشافه اسم Pithecanthropus erectus ، والذي يُترجم تقريبًا إلى رجل قرد منتصب. اليوم ، يُطلق على أشباه البشر التي جاءت منها هذه الحفريات اسم الإنسان المنتصب ، وقد استعاد علماء الأنثروبولوجيا العشرات منها في جميع أنحاء إفريقيا وآسيا وأوروبا. لا يمكن المبالغة في ضخامة اكتشاف دوبوا. لقد أظهر أنه كان هناك كائن حي على هذا الكوكب يسد - على الأقل من حيث حجم الدماغ - الفجوة بين القردة الحديثة والإنسان الحديث. لم يعد الرابط مفقودًا.
.
Jeremy DeSilva
First Steps
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
يفترض مفهوم الحلقة المفقودة أنه يجب أن يكون هناك دليل في السجل الأحفوري لحيوان لم يكن إنسانًا وليس قردًا ولكنه كان يمتلك خصائص كليهما. في عام 1891 ، كان عالم التشريح الهولندي يوجين دوبوا يبحث عن حفريات على طول نهر سولو في جزيرة جاوا الإندونيسية. استعاد هو وفريقه ضرسًا من أشباه البشر ، وأعلى جمجمة ، وعظمة في الساق. أشارت الساق إلى أن أشباه البشر كانوا ذو قدمين ، وأن سعة الدماغ في الجمجمة تبلغ 915 سم مكعب. لا يوجد إنسان بالغ اليوم لديه دماغ بهذا الحجم ، ولا يوجد قرد لديه دماغ بهذا الحجم. في الواقع ، حجم دماغ الجمجمة تقريبًا في منتصف المسافة بين متوسط حجم دماغ الشمبانزي ودماغ الإنسان العادي : الرابط المفقود.
أطلق دوبوا على اكتشافه اسم Pithecanthropus erectus ، والذي يُترجم تقريبًا إلى رجل قرد منتصب. اليوم ، يُطلق على أشباه البشر التي جاءت منها هذه الحفريات اسم الإنسان المنتصب ، وقد استعاد علماء الأنثروبولوجيا العشرات منها في جميع أنحاء إفريقيا وآسيا وأوروبا. لا يمكن المبالغة في ضخامة اكتشاف دوبوا. لقد أظهر أنه كان هناك كائن حي على هذا الكوكب يسد - على الأقل من حيث حجم الدماغ - الفجوة بين القردة الحديثة والإنسان الحديث. لم يعد الرابط مفقودًا.
.
Jeremy DeSilva
First Steps
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
December 19, 2020
Fascinating look at walking upright
I enjoyed this book. Jeremy DeSilva writes with a good sense of humor and a conversational tone. I like how DeSilva shares his journey with the reader. He also provides information on the players in the area. There is some science in the book, but it is all very clearly explained. The book was a pleasure to read and represents excellent science writing. I recommend it for anyone interested in science.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary advance reader copy of this book via Edelweiss for review purposes.
I enjoyed this book. Jeremy DeSilva writes with a good sense of humor and a conversational tone. I like how DeSilva shares his journey with the reader. He also provides information on the players in the area. There is some science in the book, but it is all very clearly explained. The book was a pleasure to read and represents excellent science writing. I recommend it for anyone interested in science.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary advance reader copy of this book via Edelweiss for review purposes.
January 29, 2022
Very well-done science book, about how humans developed our two-legged stance. Along the way, one learns much about paleontology, anthropology and how these kinds of scientists work, in the field and in the lab. Nice brief depictions of what life may have been like for our long-ago ancestors, tied together with actual artifacts and other evidence. Easy to read, and he is very generous in his treatment of other scientists, past and present.
May 13, 2025
This was such a read!!! I never thought a book about the evolutionary aspect of upright walking could be so fascinating, at times even emotional. The author did such a great job at helping me imagine the sceneries, the times, the fossils, the lives of our farthest ancestors from over 3 million years ago. I learned a lot and had fun while reading at the same time. I so recommend this book.
December 23, 2022
About halfway. Easy to read, almost fascinating. The first part wasn't quite so because it covered a lot of ground that I had already read about recently. But when he started to explain how the differently shaped bones indicated different modes of walking, I became hooked. I will visit morphosource.org when I'm done reading.
Which isn't to say that I'm buying everything he proclaims. The bit about when we started wearing shoes doesn't seem supported by strong enough evidence to me, for example.
And I really don't like "... we didn't eliminate the Neandertals.... We made babies with them and absorbed them into our gene pool." Oh, you mean like white people in North America tried to do, with the help of boarding schools, to the Native/Indigenous people? Or even worse, just steal the women away from their communities and claim the babies as white/homo sapien? Sounds like "elimination" of another people to me.
I did like one thing that he explained better than I've seen elsewhere: "Around 245 million years ago, for reasons still unclear, the archosaur lineage split, and two dominant forms evolved. One eventually led to modern-day crocodiles and alligators. The other became dinosaurs and eventually birds. At the base of both lineages stood bipeds."
---
Ok done reading.
"Wider hips don't make a woman's walk less efficient. They just make it mechanically different."
"Walking can not only delay some effects of aging, but can reverse them. But how? ... Those who got up and walked around had significantly greater blood flow in the middle cerebral and carotid arteries. But blood is just the vehicle. It must be carrying something of critical importance to the brain. Myokines."
"Just as humans did not evolve from chimpanzees, apes did not evolve from monkeys. Instead, they share a common ancestor."
I also appreciate the color plates in the middle of the book. Particularly the response to March of Progress (which is so very wrong) "A simplified view of bipedal evolution. -courtesy Eduardo Saiz Alonso" which shows child-bearing females walking upright long before Homo. Also the "artistic reconstruction of *Danuvius guggenmosi*, an 11.62 million-year-old upright ape from [what is now] Germany."
Highly recommended if you are at all interested in how people came to be. But read it soon if so, because it's a field that is evolving quickly and in a few years there will probably be an even more enlightening book (that may not focus so much on bipedalism).
---
Or, for the super short view, see this article that uses ESA's illustration:
https://steemit.com/science/@benfink/...
Which isn't to say that I'm buying everything he proclaims. The bit about when we started wearing shoes doesn't seem supported by strong enough evidence to me, for example.
And I really don't like "... we didn't eliminate the Neandertals.... We made babies with them and absorbed them into our gene pool." Oh, you mean like white people in North America tried to do, with the help of boarding schools, to the Native/Indigenous people? Or even worse, just steal the women away from their communities and claim the babies as white/homo sapien? Sounds like "elimination" of another people to me.
I did like one thing that he explained better than I've seen elsewhere: "Around 245 million years ago, for reasons still unclear, the archosaur lineage split, and two dominant forms evolved. One eventually led to modern-day crocodiles and alligators. The other became dinosaurs and eventually birds. At the base of both lineages stood bipeds."
---
Ok done reading.
"Wider hips don't make a woman's walk less efficient. They just make it mechanically different."
"Walking can not only delay some effects of aging, but can reverse them. But how? ... Those who got up and walked around had significantly greater blood flow in the middle cerebral and carotid arteries. But blood is just the vehicle. It must be carrying something of critical importance to the brain. Myokines."
"Just as humans did not evolve from chimpanzees, apes did not evolve from monkeys. Instead, they share a common ancestor."
I also appreciate the color plates in the middle of the book. Particularly the response to March of Progress (which is so very wrong) "A simplified view of bipedal evolution. -courtesy Eduardo Saiz Alonso" which shows child-bearing females walking upright long before Homo. Also the "artistic reconstruction of *Danuvius guggenmosi*, an 11.62 million-year-old upright ape from [what is now] Germany."
Highly recommended if you are at all interested in how people came to be. But read it soon if so, because it's a field that is evolving quickly and in a few years there will probably be an even more enlightening book (that may not focus so much on bipedalism).
---
Or, for the super short view, see this article that uses ESA's illustration:
https://steemit.com/science/@benfink/...
April 7, 2021
This book was equally funny and informative so I never got bored. I was an anthro major so some of the information was familiar, but it is written in plain language as well as academic language so anyone can enjoy this book (and it didn't give me flashbacks of writing research papers). I definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in human evolution and how we use our bodies today!
May 29, 2025
Using a vast array of anecdotal evidence, First Steps explores numerous theories about why and how our ancestors became bipedal, and what this shift meant for us as a species. The book also offers a window into the world of paleoanthropology and how even small discoveries can dramatically reshape our understanding of human evolution. With such enormous timescales and limited evidence to work from, the field is full of informed speculation and requires immense patience and meticulous research.
One of my favorite insights from the book was learning that we didn’t evolve from knucklewalking, chimpanzee like creatures. Instead, our common ancestors were likely already bipedal before the evolutionary split. While we continued walking upright, our simian relatives adapted to life on all fours
One of my favorite insights from the book was learning that we didn’t evolve from knucklewalking, chimpanzee like creatures. Instead, our common ancestors were likely already bipedal before the evolutionary split. While we continued walking upright, our simian relatives adapted to life on all fours
August 10, 2024
“Mammal behaviour is a dance of hostility and harmony.”
Love and empathy conquer all if you even care… ahhh such a good book. I love anthropology and biology and chemistry and science and history so much!!!!! Anyways this book is rly rly making me want to call a friend up and ask them if they wanna go on a walk and converse for hours, I think it’s a love language of mine.
Love and empathy conquer all if you even care… ahhh such a good book. I love anthropology and biology and chemistry and science and history so much!!!!! Anyways this book is rly rly making me want to call a friend up and ask them if they wanna go on a walk and converse for hours, I think it’s a love language of mine.
September 17, 2025
A must read for Paleo-anthropology and human evolution enthusiasts.
July 18, 2021
4.5 - Geweldig boek.
March 27, 2022
Jeremy DeSilva gives us a fascinating look at the early evolution of humans, from the, to me, unfamiliar perspective of the human foot and why we walk upright. It's an account that's conversational, clear, empathetic to both early hominins and to fellow researchers, past and present, and careful to present good scientific information, the prevailing understanding of it or his view of it, as well as competing views, with the evidence that supports the competing views. It's fair to say he's not overburdened with ego, and he has a good sense of humor.
DeSilva specializes in the hominin foot and ankle, and this is unexpectedly fascinating. The human foot, and the feet of our ancestors back to Australopithecus, is very odd compared to most primates. No other primate, indeed no other mammal, walks upright on two feet. It's a more precarious way to walk, with balance more of a challenge. It's more prone to injury, and biped with one leg out of commission, unlike a quadruped, loses mobility and becomes easy prey. For much of the last six million years, the planet was filled with predators for which our early ancestors would have been a tasty meal. Why did our ancestors set out on the road of becoming so vulnerable? What advantages were there?
I grew up being taught that early proto-humans walked out into the widening savannah, and discovered the advantages of standing up on their hind legs to see both food and predators at greater distances. As they evolved to become more adapted to bipedal locomotion, they could make better use of tools, and we were on our way to world domination.
But now newer evidence suggests we became upright while still among the trees. A life divided between the trees and the ground opened a niche for a species that could gather and carry food more easily, possibly to share with mates, offspring, or other group members. This may have been the last common ancestor for us and chimpanzees and bonobos--which then raises the question of why they gave that up to become knuckle-walkers. We don't know for sure that's what happened, but it's what the evidence suggests now.
Oue early human ancestors emerged onto the savannah already upright, accustomed to carrying things, and able to see what was happening at a greater distance than quadrupeds.
We get an interesting overview of the early human species, including the growing number we know to have been contemporary with early homo sapiens. Some of them, certainly Neanderthals and Denisovans, and possibly others, we interbred with. Others, we may have wiped out. There's more than I can do justice to in a review.
It seems that walking upright did more than give us access to the savannah and the ability to make and carry tools. It also gave us the breath control that makes complex speech physically possible.
In addition to the hard science and the interesting and complex process of how we make paleoanthropological discoveries and work out what they mean, DeSilva goes on to the equally fascinating subject of how this evolutionary history interacts with how we live now. This includes the unexpected importance of just getting out and walking for our physical and mental health.
There's much to learn here, and it's a very enjoyable listen. Highly recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
DeSilva specializes in the hominin foot and ankle, and this is unexpectedly fascinating. The human foot, and the feet of our ancestors back to Australopithecus, is very odd compared to most primates. No other primate, indeed no other mammal, walks upright on two feet. It's a more precarious way to walk, with balance more of a challenge. It's more prone to injury, and biped with one leg out of commission, unlike a quadruped, loses mobility and becomes easy prey. For much of the last six million years, the planet was filled with predators for which our early ancestors would have been a tasty meal. Why did our ancestors set out on the road of becoming so vulnerable? What advantages were there?
I grew up being taught that early proto-humans walked out into the widening savannah, and discovered the advantages of standing up on their hind legs to see both food and predators at greater distances. As they evolved to become more adapted to bipedal locomotion, they could make better use of tools, and we were on our way to world domination.
But now newer evidence suggests we became upright while still among the trees. A life divided between the trees and the ground opened a niche for a species that could gather and carry food more easily, possibly to share with mates, offspring, or other group members. This may have been the last common ancestor for us and chimpanzees and bonobos--which then raises the question of why they gave that up to become knuckle-walkers. We don't know for sure that's what happened, but it's what the evidence suggests now.
Oue early human ancestors emerged onto the savannah already upright, accustomed to carrying things, and able to see what was happening at a greater distance than quadrupeds.
We get an interesting overview of the early human species, including the growing number we know to have been contemporary with early homo sapiens. Some of them, certainly Neanderthals and Denisovans, and possibly others, we interbred with. Others, we may have wiped out. There's more than I can do justice to in a review.
It seems that walking upright did more than give us access to the savannah and the ability to make and carry tools. It also gave us the breath control that makes complex speech physically possible.
In addition to the hard science and the interesting and complex process of how we make paleoanthropological discoveries and work out what they mean, DeSilva goes on to the equally fascinating subject of how this evolutionary history interacts with how we live now. This includes the unexpected importance of just getting out and walking for our physical and mental health.
There's much to learn here, and it's a very enjoyable listen. Highly recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
April 22, 2021
Having recently read Fossil Men, much of which turns upon when exactly bipedalism and upright locomotion first evolved in hominins, this book was especially fascinating, positing that the evidence now suggests that the formulation above may be putting it wrong - that bipedalism may have already evolved and been established in the last common ancestor of hominins and apes, and that the question is not when hominins evolved bipedalism, but when apes evolved away from it. Really fascinating stuff.
May 8, 2021
This book dovetailed nicely with two other recent books on paleoanthropology that I've read within the last few months: "Fossil Men" and "Ancient Bones." Some of the people in the first book and the author of the second book were mentioned in this one, but the book really took a different approach and there was surprisingly little redundancy among all three books.
In my opinion, "Fossil Men" was the most interesting of the three but I would put this one in second place since it has so much unique content. The best option: read all three!
In my opinion, "Fossil Men" was the most interesting of the three but I would put this one in second place since it has so much unique content. The best option: read all three!
March 29, 2022
I have no idea why this is so highly rated. The paleoanthropology is better covered in Berger's book "Almost Human", and this book references him quite a bit. It has a couple of interesting chapters on hip and foot anatomy specifically that isn't caught by Almost Human, but then it devolves into popsci's worst trope of just listing random facts that tie to the premise of the book. Not in some grand cohesive way to further a point, but as a collection of listicles and fun facts from other better books and research, crammed in for filler.
July 9, 2021
Started out strong, but then seems to sidestep into a bunch of social topics that were only loosely related to the core discussion of the book. The second half felt more like filler in order to get a higher page count.
June 23, 2023
4,5 to było świetne, nie spodziewałam się że tak mi się spodoba
August 1, 2023
very interesting and easy to follow! if you have any interest in paleoanthropology this is a good book to read! not full of academic jargon to make your brain explode but not too simple to where you’d think it wasn’t written by someone in the field. it has some academics in it but it’s easy to understand. overall, an interesting field for sure! but with a very fast moving field, some of this data has probably already been superseded by some new discoveries. some interesting takes in this one though, for sure.
March 26, 2023
This was a fun, relatively easy read. Lots of familiar stuff for me in this book - I think I’ve cited at least five papers mentioned for assignments this semester. However, it made me realize that I don’t want to study foot bones professionally.
A quick summary: bipedalism is complicated (part I). It took a while to evolve (part I and II) and gave us health problems (part III). Take a walk, it’s good for you (part III).
A quick summary: bipedalism is complicated (part I). It took a while to evolve (part I and II) and gave us health problems (part III). Take a walk, it’s good for you (part III).
August 31, 2021
The book could have been a longish article in a journal. There are nuggets around the incomplete evolution of the sapient species. The downsides of the bipedal form of walking. The longer endurance for women. The fact that we need to walk to think.
The autobiographical intent comes through. There are repeated attempts to recreate the environment around a meeting that the author had. They do not come across well.
You can walk past this book.
The autobiographical intent comes through. There are repeated attempts to recreate the environment around a meeting that the author had. They do not come across well.
You can walk past this book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 27, 2022
Do you like walking and/or talking? If so, you can thank a bunch of tree-hugging, tech-savvy ape matriarchs who helped us evolve into bipedal powerhouses.
That's my pointed summary of this book. Alas, the author seems way too aw-shucks nice to fight for any specific hypothesis. But here's what I gathered:
- Both humans AND apes may have descended from an upright walker who lived in the trees. The question isn't why humans stood up, but why "our ancestors never dropped down on all fours in the first place." We're talking about upright walkers who lived 10 million years ago. They roamed from East Africa, to the Danube river valley. With their arms free, these ancestors could gather food from the ground and bring it back up into the trees.
- Female hominins may have developed technology before their male counterparts (e.g. baby slings) . These items helped make up for the lost advantages of four-footed locomotion (e.g. having your children conveniently cling to your back hair as you clamber along a branch).
- Females helping females needed to happen before our brains could expand. Human babies' big heads need to rotate so they can exit the pelvis, meaning that humans need help with birth.
- But, as the author highlights, humans aren't the only apes who call on midwives. It seems probable that, "when the last common ancestor of humans, chimps, and bonobos gave birth, other females were present and ready to assist. Perhaps social support during bipedal hominin births predates the physical need to have helpers... In the chicken-and-egg scenario of birth assistance and rotational birth, the logical conclusion is that the helpers came first."
- Upright walking may have come first, language second, because hominins needed an upright gait to make complex language sounds.
So, as you enjoy this brain-candy book, spare a thought for our great-great-grandmother apes who helped each other walk across the world.
That's my pointed summary of this book. Alas, the author seems way too aw-shucks nice to fight for any specific hypothesis. But here's what I gathered:
- Both humans AND apes may have descended from an upright walker who lived in the trees. The question isn't why humans stood up, but why "our ancestors never dropped down on all fours in the first place." We're talking about upright walkers who lived 10 million years ago. They roamed from East Africa, to the Danube river valley. With their arms free, these ancestors could gather food from the ground and bring it back up into the trees.
- Female hominins may have developed technology before their male counterparts (e.g. baby slings) . These items helped make up for the lost advantages of four-footed locomotion (e.g. having your children conveniently cling to your back hair as you clamber along a branch).
- Females helping females needed to happen before our brains could expand. Human babies' big heads need to rotate so they can exit the pelvis, meaning that humans need help with birth.
- But, as the author highlights, humans aren't the only apes who call on midwives. It seems probable that, "when the last common ancestor of humans, chimps, and bonobos gave birth, other females were present and ready to assist. Perhaps social support during bipedal hominin births predates the physical need to have helpers... In the chicken-and-egg scenario of birth assistance and rotational birth, the logical conclusion is that the helpers came first."
- Upright walking may have come first, language second, because hominins needed an upright gait to make complex language sounds.
So, as you enjoy this brain-candy book, spare a thought for our great-great-grandmother apes who helped each other walk across the world.
March 20, 2025
Spodziewałam się bardziej naukowego języka, jednak miło się zaskoczyłam. Książka jest napisana przystępnym językiem i nie trzeba mieć wiedzy biologiczno-ewolucyjnej, żeby móc ją zrozumieć, ponieważ wszystko jest na bierząco tłumaczone. Bardzo podobało mi się, że oprócz naukowych faktów dużo było gdybań na temat tego, jak mogło wyglądać kiedyś życie w formie krótkich historii. Książkę można podzielić na badania dotyczące przeszłości i pochodzenia ludzkiego, oraz te bardziej współczesne (choć niektóre badania wydają mi się niekoniecznie prawdziwe, jak chociażby to, że w heteroseksualnych związkach to mężczyzna dostosowywuje swoje tempo chodu do partnerki). Mimo to wszystkie badania, na które powołuje się autor są dość aktualne i świeże, bo książka została wydana w 2022r. Zdobyta wiedza jest naprawdę interesująca i praktyczna, dlatego zdecydowanie polecam każdemu przeczytanie tej książki, zwłaszcza że zmienia ona obraz pochodzenia człowieka.
August 19, 2022
Not only was this book full of fascinating hypothesis about the origin of bipedal hominids, it also left me with an uplifting feeling, bringing to the foreground that cooperation has played a major part in the way we’ve evolved, based on many instances of fossils showing evidence of life-threatening injuries that healed, which couldn’t have happened without other individuals in the group taking care of injured party.
I particularly liked that DeSilva definitely has hypothesis he thinks are more likely to be true than others, but he doesn’t claim to know for sure, which is the only reasonable thing to do for now, since the fossil record is nowhere near as helpful as we need it to be. What a wonderful book.
I particularly liked that DeSilva definitely has hypothesis he thinks are more likely to be true than others, but he doesn’t claim to know for sure, which is the only reasonable thing to do for now, since the fossil record is nowhere near as helpful as we need it to be. What a wonderful book.
March 1, 2025
3.5 stars. I thought most of this book was quite interesting, and it held my attention. I enjoyed the thorough descriptions of each human species’ anatomy, as well as the explanation of in what order various aspects of our bodies evolved. I do wish that the book was a bit more general. I was getting a little tired of the specific topic of bipedalism, especially near the end. The last third of the book felt pretty repetitive and basic to me. Overall a pretty good read. Would recommend to people particularly interested in paleoanthropology/human evolution.
June 29, 2022
A thoroughly enjoyable and fascinating account of the evolution of bipedalism, tracing the origins of how we move around on two legs back to our ancestors millions of years ago. DeSilva writes with such enthusiasm about his scientific area of expertise (paleoanthropology), providing the reader with interesting facts and theories surrounding our origins and how natural selection has sculpted us into the creatures we are today.
To quote the closing lines of the book: “it is time to embrace the lessons the bones of our ancestors teach us and construct a new human origin story in which the evolutionary success of this extraordinary upright ape is attributed in large part to our capacity for empathy, tolerance, and cooperation.”
To quote the closing lines of the book: “it is time to embrace the lessons the bones of our ancestors teach us and construct a new human origin story in which the evolutionary success of this extraordinary upright ape is attributed in large part to our capacity for empathy, tolerance, and cooperation.”
June 4, 2021
As someone interested in the human foot, this book was perfect! It is also written for a general audience and easily accessible, which I enjoyed. I highlighted, underlined, starred, and dog eared every corner of this book. It is informative and entertaining. Highly recommend!
September 5, 2022
Somehow I had to restart reading this book multiple times before I could actually complete it. The first part built up to why we evolved due to walking and being bipedal and I was hoping that it would offer a more elaborate explanation on the evolution of language and other things due to walking upright (apart from breathing) maybe it's my simplistic view that development of language and other sophistication in us got to have a more elaborate reason. But my view cannot effect the quality or the effort behind the book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2023
Rewelacyjna książka, chyba najlepsza o ewolucji i ewolucji człowieka jaką czytałam. Napisana dość prostym językiem, wciągająca i posiadająca dużo ciekawostek. Dużo się z niej dowiedziałam rzeczy, które w innych książkach w tym temacie były pomijane. Polecam!
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