Why do Humans Walk Upright? With Professor Jerry DeSilva

The Sydcast

Episode Summary:

Why do humans walk on two feet? Every other animal motors on four legs (paws), and they do it way faster than we do, but we humans walk upright. If you thought evolution is supposed to select for attributes that enhance survival, then we have a real puzzle, among the most fundamental in human evolution. And that’s the puzzle Jerry DeSilva sets out to explain in his highly accessible book “First Steps,” and in this episode of The Sydcast.

Sydney Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

Jeremy DeSilva

Jeremy "Jerry" DeSilva is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. He is a paleoanthropologist, specializing in the locomotion of the first apes (hominoids) and early human ancestors (hominins). His particular anatomical expertise-- the human foot and ankle-- has contributed to our understanding of the origins and evolution of upright walking in the human lineage. He has studied wild chimpanzees in Western Uganda and early human fossils in Museums throughout Eastern and South Africa. From 1998-2003, Jerry worked as an educator at the Boston Museum of Science and continues to be passionate about science education. He is the author of the 2021 book First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human. Jerry lives in Norwich, VT with his wife Erin and their twins Ben and Josie.

Insights from this Episode:

• How Jeremy’s curiosity for studying human walking began.
• How writing a book and giving a voice to the scientist is perceived in the scientific community.
• Explanations on why the apes are relatives of the human species but not ancestors.
• Hypothesis on how the phenomena of walking on two feet began seven to eight million years ago.
• Difficulties and advantages that walking upright brought to the human species.
• Myths about the evolution of the human species and its cooperative nature.

Quotes from the Show:

• “The best leaders are the ones that ask good questions”- Syd Finkelstein [3:43]
• “I'm really interested in how animals move and how they get from point A to point B and what adaptations they’ve evolved” - Jerry DeSilva [8:26]
• “Once you start moving onto two legs it comes with the sacrifice of your ability to climb in an acrobatic kind of way”- Jerry DeSilva [12:46]
• “I wanted to produce something that was gonna have a wider reach and was gonna be read frankly by more people than you know, some paper on a fossil metatarsal that'll be read by 7 of my colleagues” - Jerry DeSilva [15:09]
• “[About Scientists] We’re just curious people wondering how the world works” - Jerry DeSilva [18:34]
• “I've always thought that the job of a professor/academic is the creation and the dissemination of knowledge” Syd Finkelstein [19:28]
• “Wherever you put down [in the museum] needs to be understood by people of all different ages, all different backgrounds, all different levels of education” - Jerry DeSilva [21:56]
• “My father on the writing [process] used to always ask: when you put it on a paper and you read it out loud, would you ever say that? If you’re in a conversation with somebody, would you ever say a sentence like that? and If the answer is no, then don’t write it like that” - Jerry DeSilva [27:48]
• “[About the chimpanzee’s] we can't quite treat them as time machines but we can treat them as models” - Jerry DeSilva [38:09]
• “What increases your ability to survive… is very often cooperation” - Jerry DeSilva [51:33]

Stay Connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Jeremy DeSilva

Twitter: Jeremy DeSilva (@desilva_jerry)

Website: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/desilva/

Book: https://www.amazon.com/First-Steps-Upright-Walking-Human/dp/0062938495

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This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.