Human Locomotor Versatility | The walking, running, climbing, diving, swimming ape

After many, many months of reading ethnography after ethnography, the first paper of my PhD has finally been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B!

You can find it here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.2553

We may be two-legged apes, but it seems that running and walking aren’t all we’re good at. Academia and the media repeatedly champion the famous tree-climbing and spearfishing societies like the Korowai or Bajau, but are these actually exceptional cases? Having waded through over 900 accounts of hunter-gatherers worldwide it seems that running, climbing, swimming and diving are actually present to high levels of ability in societies globally: from tundra to rainforest to desert; for food acquisition to ritual to leisure; routinely practiced by both men and women. The human species may have evolved to walking upright, but diverse locomotor versatility is our human birthright; a locomotor flexibility central to our ability to exploit almost every environment on earth—we are the walking, running, climbing, diving, swimming ape.

Bajau spearfisherman, Wakatobi National Park, Sulawesi, Indonesia (March 2020)