Dr. Henry Gee
speaker
130 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Henry Gee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And there's another one in, there's some more in Ethiopia, Australopithecus, but there were some later ones and there were some slightly different ones. So there were quite a few of them. Now, whether there'll be a shakedown and they'll all be the same species or not, or whether there'll be more species, it's very hard to say.
But certainly, as much as anyone has looked between about five and two and a half million years ago, the Australopithecus model of hominin, which is basically a bipedal chimp, was the kind of hominin that existed on the Earth.
It's a big question. I mean, the question is, why did bipedality happen in the first place? It's a really unlikely form of locomotion.
And in my new book, which I wanted to call Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way, but the publishers insisted I called it The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, I have a whole chapter on bipedality and why it was one of the worst things that could ever have happened to us.
Traditionally, explanations for bipedality, why we got up and stood on two legs, have been of a kind of after-the-fact reasoning. In other words, we got up on our hind legs to free our hands so we could make tools or carry babies or look over the long grass or show off our gender genitalia to prospective mate or any other idea you can come up with.
But these don't actually explain the existence of bipedality in the sense that bipedality is far more than getting up on your hind legs. Various animals can do this, but only for a short time because it's very tiring.
And to be bipedal, as a matter of course, requires a complete reengineering of the entire body, from the back of the skull, the curvature of the spine, the internal organs, the valves in the veins in our legs, how our feet are constructed. and all sorts of other things. And bipedality is unbelievably maladaptive.
The reason is that for most of the history of backboned animals, our backbone was evolved about half a billion years ago in an aquatic ancestor. And basically, it's a kind of clothesline. It's a kind of clothesline on which the internal organs are hung. So it's basically a beam that's held horizontally in tension. And that's great.
But bipeds in the past that were successful, such as dinosaurs, even though they were bipeds, they still held their backbone horizontally. And they were bipeds because they had a very long tail as a kind of cantilever to the trunk. and that allowed them to be bipedal. But humans don't have tails, so we have to do it the hard way.
We have to stand the whole body up, change the backbone so it's held vertically in compression. Now, because of this, bad backs are the single most important cause of absenteeism in humans. The vertical state of humans is responsible for edema in the legs, piles, hernias, blue ear in babies. All sorts of musculoskeletal problems are caused by bipedalism. It was a very bad thing.
So how did it evolve? Well, no one knows, but the current frontrunner, as it were, is Well, it probably evolved when we were mostly living in trees.
Now, apes and monkeys have a variety of ways of getting around in trees, and one of them is kind of a clambering or climbing mode of locomotion, where it's called an orthograde posture, where the creatures basically are climbing in a vertical way among the branches. So I think bipedality is basically climbing among the branches only without the branches.
And that's the nearest anyone can get to it. All the other things that have been ascribed to bipedality as an advantage, such as the aquatic ape theory, wading in water, or carrying babies, or making tools, These don't require bipedality to happen. There are lots and lots of very successful ground-living monkeys such as baboons that carry their babies quite well and their quadrupeds.
There are monkeys such as capuchins which are quadrupeds that make tools. They just sit on their haunches and do it. Mere cats can stand up and look over the grass and stand on things. So why bipedality happened? What good is it for? Well, it's certainly good for all these things, but it's certainly very bad in many other ways. Also, it's very disadvantageous if you break a leg.
Now, everyone's seen three-legged dogs running along quite happily. But, you know, a one-legged hominin, if you broke a leg, you'd be killed. You'd be eaten instantly by some animal. I mean, I broke an ankle in a trivial accident at home.
few years ago and i was only rehabilitated thanks to the national health service so i was carted off in an ambulance i will have the administration of surgeons and anesthetists and physiotherapists and a wheelchair alone from the red cross and the long-suffering mrs g to pull me to to push me around in it and a circumstance which definitely led although she denies it to her
going back to university to qualify as a nurse, specialising in people with learning disabilities, go figure. But without all these things, I would have died. So natural selection ensured that when hominins started to be bipedal, they had to get very good at it very quickly. Otherwise, so once they started to be bipedal, there was no way back.
And so that's why you get all these bipedal hominins around that time.
Yes, 2.5 million years ago or thereabouts was a big change in the Earth climate. It suddenly began to get much cooler than it had been and more seasonal. That's when in the north and far south and in mountain ranges, the ice ages, the sequences of ice ages began to take hold and become more serious. And the result of that was in the tropics,
The forest shrunk further, and something opened up this tropical grassland called the savannah, which opened up. And around that time, two new kinds of hominin appeared. One was called Paranthropus, which was a specialist vegetarian. Now, all hominins before that had been kind of scavengers, omnivores.
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