Upright : The Evolutionary Key to Becoming Human

by Stanford, Craig B.

• ISBN13: 9780618302475
• ISBN10: 0618302476
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-12-15
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Summary

What, in evolutionary terms, propelled us to become human? The answer lies not in our forebears'big brains or their facility with language but in their ability to walk on two feet. That remarkable fact - standing and walking seem so mundane -- only starts the drama that Craig Stanford, codirector of the Jane Goodall Research Center, tells of our origins. Today scientists are finding far more evidence than ever before about our beginnings. The discoveries are prompting dramatic reappraisals of common beliefs about our past. Throw out the simple idea that millions of years ago some apes moved to the African savanna, where they evolved into runty hominids who eventually metamorphosed into us. Dump that textbook image of an ape transforming into a human in five stages. Newly found remnants of two-legged "proto-humans" show that our ancestry is much richer and more convoluted. In no way can we still think of ourselves as standing on the top rung of an evolutionary ladder of excellence. But what about our tremendous thinking powers? Our brains could have started to grow because, as our ancestors adapted to standing and walking upright, they became more successful at hunting ever larger animals. The meatier diet could have fueled the increase in brain size. And the switch to standing and walking tall may have allowed our forebears to develop language, let alone take over the entire world as their home. Describing his - and others' - latest research and interpretations, Stanford offers a fresh, galvanizing take on what made us human.

Author Biography

Craig Stanford is co-director of the Jane Goodall Primate Research Center and associate professor at the department of anthropology, University of Southern California. His previous books are: Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature (Basic, 2001), The Hunting Apes: Meat-easting and the Origins of Human Behavior (Princeton U. Press,1999), and Chimpanzee and Red Colobus: The Ecology of Predator and Prey (Harvard U. Press, 1998).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Preface: Baby Steps	xv
A First Step	1	(14)
Knuckling Under	15	(23)
Heaven's Gait?	38	(23)
The Extended Family	61	(17)
Everybody Loves Lucy	78	(26)
What Do You Stand For?	104	(18)
The Search for Meat	122	(20)
Better Bipeds	142	(30)
Sky Walkers	172	(7)
Bibliography and Further Reading	179	(15)
Index	194

Excerpts

PREFACEBABY STEPSI remember vividly the first time that each of my three children took her or his first unassisted steps. My firstborn had been "cruising" for weeks - pulling herself up and walking while holding on to furniture, people, dogs, and anything else that she could grab. But at ten months she was ready to be a biped. She stepped away from my hands and walked several lock-legged goose steps into her mothers arms. My daughters wide eyes showed her shock at the performance. We beamed, imagining that our parenting skills had something to do with teaching her this most natural of all uniquely human acts. Three years later we were living in a village in rural Mexico and obsessing about the diseases that our younger daughter was contracting by crawling in the dust. Then one day she stood up and toddled, and that was that. My son was a different story; I was in East Africa, having left on a month-long trip knowing I would likely miss the big event. Sure enough, shortly after I arrived in Uganda, I learned through the crackling static of a phone call that Adam, after much frustration at trying to carry a ball while crawling, had simply stood up and walked, the ball in his arms and an ear-to- ear grin of accomplishment on his face. Few of us appreciate our history of becoming bipeds, perhaps because walking requires so little energy or thought. Most of us think that our exalted intellect or our ability to grasp with our thumbs is what sets us apart from the other primates. But all primates share the grasping thumb, and the difference between an apes brain and our own is not as great as people think. Some parts have undergone a critical reorganization, such as the speech centers, but a human brain is basically a ballooned version of a chimpanzee brain. Our ability to stand and walk habitually on two feet, however, represents a fundamental change from the kind of creatures that our ancestors were. Bipedalism preceded the expansion of brain size by about five million years; it truly announced the dawn of humanity. Becoming bipedal made us human. Whenever a fossil human is discovered, the first piece of crucial information that everyone wants to know is "Did it walk upright?" The second question is "How will it change our family tree?" To an extent unappreciated by most of us, walking is sexy. It is the key part of a cascade of traits that evolved together in an intricate mosaic of ape and early human features. For instance, walking on two legs rather than four released our bodies from the constraints of the synchronized breathing gait that so many other animals, such as dogs and horses, live by. Once the lungs of our two-legged ancestors were freed, they could modulate their breathing in subtle ways that may have contributed to the evolution of speech. The connection between walking upright and speaking is one of many vivid examples of the jigsaw-puzzle evolution of our bodies. Why we are bipedal is not simple to expla

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Excerpted from Upright: The Evolutionary Key to Becoming Human by Craig B. Stanford, Craig Stanford
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