Walking Is Central to Human Evolution, but Nobody Knows Why

Photo by Rachel Woock on Unsplash

One of the oddest, most improbable things about humans is that we are habitual bipeds. That is, we walk most of the time on two legs.

Lots of mammals can and do walk on two legs: bears, lemurs, capuchin monkeys. But humans are the only mammals who do it habitually — all the time, everywhere we go. Once you learn about the complexity and difficulty of bipedal…