Free the foot: The strange business of walking

  • 📰 dailymaverick
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 89 sec. here
  • 3 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 39%
  • Publisher: 84%

Business News News

Business Business Latest News,Business Business Headlines

We do it without thinking and have been doing it for thousands of years. But we’ve lost the art of saunter and the touch of the earth on our soles.

This morning you rolled out of bed and did one of the most confounding things known to paleoanthropology: you stood up.

Another theory is that our pre-human ancestors took to the water, becoming aquatic apes. You don’t need hair in water and we have more fat under our skin than all other land mammals. We can also swim better than any other primate and our nostrils are built so we don’t take water when we dive. But no, the fossil record shows huge crocs in the Rift Valley lakes where we are thought to have begun.

All other primates eat what they find, but to bring food home required the ability to carry it and walking on two legs made that possible. Females would select males who lost out in the warring stakes because of poor dentures and who therefore cooperated with them and other males in order to survive. To do that they needed to become bipedal.

“He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the saunterer is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.” Together with biokineticist Avi Pursad, Chris explained why by slipping off his shoes and waggling his toes. “Your foot is designed to bend and when this happens it does two very different things milliseconds apart. On contact with the ground your heel acts like a turd from a tall cow and blobs. As soon as you roll forwards the tendons go soft allowing the bones to spread and your foot to widen.

Marguerite Osler, an Alexander Technique teacher, become so concerned about people stomping and shuffling around that she wrote a book to help them walk.is more poetry than prose and more Zen than science but is a lyrical plea to take off our shoes and live. There are, she says, three causes for our crippled locomotion: fashion, the cult of exercise and a tradition of military marching.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.
We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 3. in BUSİNESS

Business Business Latest News, Business Business Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.

WATCH: Market ReportBusiness Day TV talks to Viv Govender from Rand Swiss Offshore
Source: BDliveSA - 🏆 12. / 63 Read more »