This essay begins a series about the importance of walking in human evolution and history.
Cogito, ergo sum, said Pascal, or someone. I think, therefore I am. In French it would be je pense, donc je suis. But one French writer, an anthropologist named Pascal Picq, has changed this a little. He says, je marche, donc je pense. I walk, therefore I think. He has made the case that we are not just bipeds who think, but we think because we are bipeds. He attributes the evolution of human intelligence not just to the fact we are bipeds, but because we are bipeds who can walk and run for long distances, with outstanding endurance not found in other mammal species. Maybe this is obvious to you, but I’d never thought of it until I read Picq’s book La Marche.
Picq overviewed the history of scientific explanations for why humans walk upright. This has always been somewhat of an enigma. Quadrupeds can run a lot faster than we can. Anthropologists have come up with all kinds of advantages that bipedalism conferred on our ancestors, such as being able to look out over the vegetation to see either danger or opportunity, or to use our forelegs as arms that can carry things such as food and kids and weapons. Long distance migration is what evolution has favored in our species: even old people can walk long distances unless they have health problems or are injured (I do it nearly every day), and there are a lot more elderly marathon runners than elderly speed sprinters.
While these things are all true, Picq has added another: bipedalism has altered the evolution of our minds. Bipedalism (as in Australopithecus) preceded intelligence (as in Homo), and here are some reasons why.
Humans are superb wanderers and have been so throughout our evolutionary history. National Geographic writer Paul Salopek is retracing, on foot, the epic journey of humankind from our African genesis to the end of the journey in South America. Other mammals run faster, but do not migrate as far as humans have. Starting about a hundred thousand years ago, prehistoric humans spread from Africa to every continent except Antarctica. These migrations set up an advantage for intelligence, because our ancestors had to decide whether to migrate (that is, is migration worth the cost of leaving home), and then how to get someplace and know that the new place was where we wanted to stay. This required superb observation and memory of the environment and ability to analyze opportunities. This was true on the short scale (we want to go this way, but there is a river, and we have to figure out how to cross it, which may involve turning around and going back the way we came) and the long scale (we want to get to that hill, from which we can see into the distance and plan what to do next, if anything). Homo sapiens was apparently better than this than Homo neanderthalensis. Our intelligent ancestors also had to think ahead about, and remember, the migration routes and habits of their prey. Neanderthals killed mastodons; humans planned ahead about where the mastodons would be before trying to kill them.
In all these ways, our thinking evolved as a series of logical steps. That is, it required reasoning ability. A primitive (or modern) philosopher or scientist will try out ideas to see if they work, then come up with a backup plan if it doesn’t. This, Picq speculates, uses a similar mental network to figuring out where to go and how to get there on foot.
On top of all that, walking and running makes us feel good and releases us from stress. Picq said he got some of his best ideas while walking. I have the same experience. And perhaps the best example is Charles Darwin, whose “walking path” at Down House was where he got, and perfected, his major ideas. He did not get them sitting at his desk. Many famous composers, as well as other scholars, carried writing equipment with them. I have heard that Beethoven and Dvořák wrote musical ideas as they walked (see a later essay on this topic). Today, we have cell phones on which the thinking walker can record ideas.
All of this appeared on my science blog. I might also speculate that the origin of religion is partly influenced by walking. Our ancestors might have come up with religious explanations of the origin and purpose of things they saw and thought about along the way. And if they headed toward a distant mountain, this might make them wonder if they were headed toward a distant heaven as well. We walk by faith, and not by sight, the Bible says.
According to Picq, what science and philosophy needs more of is people who walk and think, rather than sit at desks and read what other people have written.
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