price we pay for being able to scamper and sprint is, for many, backache and knee pain in later life—or indeed not so late in life. Such is the pressure on the spine from our upright posture that pathological changes can be detected “as early as the eighteenth year,” as Peter Medawar noted. The problem, of course, is that we come from a long line of beings whose skeletons were designed to take our weight on four legs. We will look at the benefits and consequences of this massive change to our anatomy more closely in the next chapter, but for the moment it’s enough to bear in mind that becoming
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