Early Hominid Posture And Locomotion

There are coffee-table books. There are holiday reads. And then there are books with titles like Early Hominid Posture and Locomotion, which confidently assume that the average reader has often found themselves wondering exactly how our distant ancestors first mastered the subtle art of standing up without immediately falling over again.

Published in 1972 by the University of Chicago Press, this is a splendidly serious work by the distinguished palaeoanthropologist John T. Robinson, who devoted much of his career to understanding the earliest members of the human family tree. While many books on human evolution ask the grand question, "Where did we come from?", Robinson narrows his sights to something altogether more fundamental: "How exactly did we get from walking like that to walking like this?" As it turns out, the answer involves millions of years of anatomical tinkering, a remarkable collection of fossil bones, and an astonishing amount of scientific detective work.

This is the sort of book that quietly dismantles the popular image of evolution as a neat procession of increasingly upright apes. Instead, Robinson reveals a far more complicated story, one involving hips, knees, feet, vertebrae and skulls that stubbornly refuse to fit anyone’s tidy theories. Every fossil becomes a clue. Every fragment of pelvis is treated with the reverence usually reserved for crown jewels. Somewhere in the background, generations of anthropologists politely disagree with one another in the restrained yet unmistakably competitive language that only academics truly master.

The title itself has an almost hypnotic charm. Early Hominid Posture and Locomotion sounds less like a book and more like an exceptionally niche Olympic event. One imagines judges awarding points for efficient bipedalism while puzzled Australopithecines shuffle uncertainly towards the finish line. Yet beneath the wonderfully technical exterior lies one of the biggest questions in science: what made us human? Or, perhaps more accurately, what persuaded our ancestors that walking upright was preferable to spending eternity climbing trees and alarming leopards?

Being a University of Chicago Press publication, there is not a great deal of unnecessary excitement. Robinson does not interrupt proceedings with dramatic cliff-hangers or chapters entitled "Ten Weird Tricks Your Ancestors Used to Evolve!" Instead, he presents careful evidence, thoughtful analysis and the kind of meticulous scholarship that slowly convinces the reader they are in the hands of someone who genuinely knows what a fossil femur is supposed to look like.

This copy is in near fine condition, which is considerably younger-looking than the fossil specimens discussed within its pages. The binding is excellent, the pages remain clean and crisp, and it appears to have spent the last half-century resting quietly on a shelf rather than accompanying an overenthusiastic anthropologist into the East African Rift Valley.

Crappy Old Books is always delighted to rescue volumes like this from undeserved obscurity. It may never outsell the latest celebrity memoir, but unlike many modern books it grapples with questions measured not in election cycles or quarterly profits, but in millions of years. If you’ve ever wondered why humans walk upright, why chimpanzees do not, or why evolution insists on taking the scenic route, this wonderfully scholarly classic has been waiting patiently since 1972 to explain it all—one fossil bone at a time.

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