On Two Feet
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2015
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the things that makes us different from other animals is the way we move around on two feet. Figuring out how and why our ancestors first stood up is one of the big questions in the study of human evolution. Carol Ward is an anatomy professor at the University of Missouri, and she's a paleoanthropologist who studies locomotion in our earliest primate ancestors. She tells the story of one bone and how it answered a question about how one of our most famous early ancestors moved.
This is the first episode of Origin Stories, The Leakey Foundation's monthly podcast about anthropology, human origins, evolution, and human and primate behavior. We'll explore what it means to be human and the science behind what we know about ourselves.
This show is a project of The Leakey Foundation.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:12.0 | I remember walking in and my professor, who's a man named Dr. Milford Waphoff, |
| 0:20.0 | he said, I'm a paleoanthropologist, and he wrote that word on the board, and he turned to us and he said, The Earth is a disc riding on the back of the giant turtle, and the stars are painted in the canopy high above us, and he just looked at us. And we argued about it for two days. No, it's a sphere. We know that. And he would say, |
| 0:40.1 | how do you know? How do you know? And it took me about 20 years or so to realize he was talking |
| 0:44.6 | about how science works and testing hypotheses and trying to falsify ideas and how it all worked. |
| 0:50.7 | How can you learn things? How do we know and how do we know about human evolution? I got |
| 0:55.2 | excited in the process of learning as much as I got excited about the actual fossils themselves. |
| 1:00.8 | And I was hooked. That's Carol Ward. She teaches anatomy to medical students at the University of |
| 1:05.7 | Missouri, and she's a paleoanthropologist. What does that mean? I'm interested in how humans evolved. And I want to find out how we got to be the amazing species we are today. And the best way to do that is to look back at the fossil record, which shows us how and when all the different features that make us unique first appeared. And one especially unique feature? The way we move around. On two feet. There are not many animals that do that. |
| 1:29.3 | Birds do that, but they also fly. |
| 1:31.3 | Some dinosaurs did that, but they're not here now. |
| 1:35.3 | Kangaroos do that, but they do it in a very unusual way, hopping around. |
| 1:39.3 | But nobody walks around like we do. |
| 1:41.3 | And we know from the fossil record that one of the first things that |
| 1:46.1 | distinguished our ancestors from apes and our forebears was standing upright and walking on two feet, |
| 1:52.4 | on two legs on the ground. So if we can figure out how and why that happened, that is going to give |
| 1:58.2 | us a really important clue into why our entire lineage began. |
| 2:02.8 | How we started walking around on two feet is one of the big questions in the study of human |
| 2:06.9 | origins. Scientists since Darwin have been trying to figure out why our ancestors first stood up. |
| 2:13.1 | Darwin, pretty good evolutionary thinker, thought that we stood upright on two feet to free |
| 2:19.2 | our hands from making and using tools and that's why we had big brains. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Meredith Johnson, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Meredith Johnson and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.