A walk through history

We see the word "paleo" bandied about a lot these days; it's used in the sense of The Paleo Diet, which means you can eat all you want as long as your diet consists of anything a caveman or cavewoman could have eaten, is popular, and allows a certain latitude for including Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Chocolate Brownie Nut Chunk, on the grounds that Gnetzut Flintstone could have conceivable milked a mammal, made ice cream, and found cocoa beans and walnuts somewhere.

Paleontologists are always digging the past, and in 1976, they found two sets of footprints dating back 3.7 million years. Right next to them was a well-worn pair of Skechers Foamie slippers, but when Ogg and Nog set their feet down to leave prints for 20th Century people to study, they left what now seems to be the oldest known evidence of upright walking among early humans.

That footprint proves to the scientists that two bipedal humans roamed the earth at the same time, and were known as the Jonas Brothers.

“These footprints demonstrate that the evolution of upright walking was more complicated and more interesting than we previously thought,” says Jeremy DeSilva, an anthropology professor at Dartmouth College. 

“There were at least two hominins (precursors of modern man who looked like Johnny Damon), walking in different ways, on differently shaped feet, at this time in our evolutionary history, showing that the acquisition of human-like walking was less linear than many imagine.”

Up til now, it was thought that only one species of human lived at the time — Australopithecus afarensis (known as "Ozzy"), who roamed ancient Africa 3.9 to 2.9 million years ago.  

Lucy the skeleton is the most famous example of Australopithecus afarensis.

But the second pair of footprints seem to belong to a different kind of human, with a peculiar way of walking. Instead of walking in a straight line, the footprints suggest they swung their foot forward and landed it in front of the other.

So that's how we used to get around - putting one foot in front of the other all day. No wonder it took forever to get to Cleveland then. Later we developed the sashay and never looked back.

And do you remember the 1963 hit recording of "Walk Right In" by the Rooftop Singers? It had that great line, "Everybody's talkin' about a new way of walkin', do you want to lose your mind?"

History wants us to remember the original version of the song, by Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, from 1929. Gus lived until 1979 but never had another hit record.

But he never lost his mind!