Our ability to walk on two legs is not only a characteristic human trait
but one of the things that made us human in the first place. Once our
ancestors could walk on two legs, they began to do many of the things
that apes cannot do: cross wide open spaces, manipulate complex tools,
communicate with new signal systems, and light fires. Titled after the
last two words of Darwin's Descent of Man and written by a leading
scholar of human evolution, Lowly Origin is the first book to explain
the sources and consequences of bipedalism to a broad audience. Along
the way, it accounts for recent fossil discoveries that show us a still
incomplete but much bushier family tree than most of us learned about in
school.
Jonathan Kingdon uses the very latest findings from ecology,
biogeography, and paleontology to build a new and up-to-date account of
how four-legged apes became two-legged hominins. He describes what it
took to get up onto two legs as well as the protracted consequences of
that step--some of which led straight to modern humans and others to
very different bipeds. This allows him to make sense of recently
unearthed evidence suggesting that no fewer than twenty species of
humans and hominins have lived and become extinct. Following the
evolution of two-legged creatures from our earliest lowly forebears to
the present, Kingdon concludes with future options for the last
surviving biped.
A major new narrative of human evolution, Lowly Origin is the best
available account of what it meant--and what it means--to walk on two
feet.
