In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration

by Shane O'Mara

Running and walking are also closely related. Humans are not especially fast runners – we can easily be outrun over short(ish) distances by lots of other species (think tigers and gazelles) – but we are exceptional walkers, possibly the best walkers of all species. And this has been the secret underlying our far-flung dispersion across the face of the earth. We humans are the most dispersed of all animal species, living in the northern and southern extremes of our planet, and at virtually every land point in between. Walking allowed us to probe and extend the edges of our world, and then undertake occasionally risky journeys by boat, travelling to the next island – which we then explored on foot. Furthermore, we first colonised the planet by walking in small migratory groups – at its core, our walking is social. An African proverb reflecting this reality says: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’16 At a slow, five kilometres a day walking – at most a few hours walking for a family group – for 300 days, you can travel 1,500 kilometres. Do that over a few years, and you will cover many thousands of kilometres. The longest land-only distance on the earth is from the west coast of Liberia on the Atlantic seaboard of Africa to the eastern Pacific coast of China, a distance of some 13,589 kilometres – about a nine-year amble. Bring it up to twenty kilometres per day for 300 days, and it’s a little over two years of walking. Over the course of a...