Chapter 4: Out of Eden
December 12, 2024·29 comments·In Brief
A single mutation created creatures that were slower, more injured, and worse at fighting than what they replaced. They could barely carry their fragile babies. Yet this "janky hip" mutation became the literal first step toward consciousness itself. How does an adaptation that made survival harder become the foundation for all that made us human?
• The costs were real and immediate. Early bipedal creatures faced saber-toothed cats, enormous crocodiles, and predators that would consider a newly walking ape a snack. On the ground, where these mutations locked them into bipedalism, the risks were worse than in trees.
• The early benefits don't add up. The energy savings of bipedal walking only emerge after millions of years of additional mutations. The better visibility and fruit-reaching advantages seem too minor to justify the skeletal restructuring and injury risks that came with it.
• Something about parenting changed everything. Bipedalism made it possible to safely carry infants. This small advantage, combined with human infants being unusually helpless and long-dependent, may have restructured early hominin society around pair bonding, male provisioning, and intensive parenting.
• The adaptation probably started in the trees, not the savanna. Early bipedal hominins still had the arms and hands of tree-dwellers millions of years after becoming bipedal. This suggests the first advantages came from standing upright among branches, not from crossing open ground.
• All of this happened before the brain changed. For the next several million years after bipedalism emerged, the brain stayed roughly the same size. Then, suddenly, Homo erectus experienced a dramatic encephalization that created the capacity for language and storytelling. But that came much, much later.
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