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First Steps
- How Upright Walking Made Us Human
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Blending history, science, and culture, a stunning and highly engaging evolutionary story exploring how walking on two legs allowed humans to become the planet’s dominant species.
Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four legs - a locomotion known as bipedalism. We strive to be upstanding citizens, honor those who stand tall and proud, and take a stand against injustices. We follow in each other’s footsteps and celebrate a child’s beginning to walk. But why, and how, exactly, did we take our first steps? And at what cost? Bipedalism has its drawbacks: Giving birth is more difficult and dangerous; our running speed is much slower than other animals; and we suffer a variety of ailments, from hernias to sinus problems.
In First Steps, paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva explores how unusual and extraordinary this seemingly ordinary ability is. A seven-million-year journey to the very origins of the human lineage, First Steps shows how upright walking was a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human - from our technological abilities, our thirst for exploration, our use of language - and may have laid the foundation for our species’ traits of compassion, empathy, and altruism. Moving from developmental psychology labs to ancient fossil sites throughout Africa and Eurasia, DeSilva brings to life our adventure walking on two legs.
Delving deeply into the story of our past and the new discoveries rewriting our understanding of human evolution, First Steps examines how walking upright helped us rise above all over species on this planet.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
Featured Article: The Best Audiobooks to Listen to While Walking
Whether you walk for your health, a form of transportation, or to exercise a pet, you can get some mental mileage with your steps when you take a great audiobook along. These listens make the perfect walking companions. They can teach you about any topic that catches your fancy, or transport you to ancient and fantastical worlds. Whether you're on a treadmill, touring the neighborhood, or going to work, these are the best audiobooks for walking.
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What listeners say about First Steps
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sarah C.
- 06-07-22
Mammalian Bipedalism's Many Layers
As DeSilva points out early in this book, bipedalism is rare in mammals other than humans. Apes and monkeys will occasionally walk on two legs, but not in the same way humans do. Why is that? There isn't a clear answer and since we're alone in this, we don't have other examples to study. But walking on two legs has fundamentally shaped who we humans are.
I appreciate DeSilva showing in the first few chapters how walking in hominid fossils has varied over time and that even our ancestors and other hominids didn't walk the same way. The search for fossil records to fill in more blanks in bipedal understanding continues, but our muscles and bones have also visibly changed thanks to what we have found so that it's becoming clearer when primates and human ancestors began to diverge in terms of movement. And the advantages and disadvantages of two-legged versus four-legged walking are very obvious when studying our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos.
The most interesting parts of this book for me were the discussions of birth effecting walking in humans and why we're so prone to movement-injuries not seen in other animals. I've never understood entirely why human childbirth is so laborious and potentially deadly compared to animals; a narrower pelvis and babies having to change positions to exit explains it some. So does why bone health is such a concern for older people and how muscles that we use (or don't use) for movement can be easily torn or dislocated.
I picked this book out of curiosity, but I am very pleased with how the read went and am more interested in the topic than before. I recommend getting this!
2 people found this helpful
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- Paige
- 05-14-21
Excellent journey through human evolution
A fun and personable tour through human origins, meeting many of our ancestors, highly recommend!
2 people found this helpful
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- Richard Liebler
- 07-06-22
Highly interesting
Well narrated. Very easy for a person without anthropology training to understand and enjoy.
1 person found this helpful
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- RGRadio
- 05-24-22
a great listen while walking ;)
This is a great book to remind us through scientific research how important it is to simply walk. the history is very interesting.
1 person found this helpful
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- Anat
- 04-17-22
Fun and interesting
This was really fun and easy to follow. Lots of interesting info and theories, nicely written and quite gripping. If you’re a non-scientist interested in some paleontology, you’ll probably enjoy this very much (as did I).
The audiobook narrator was perfect for this.
1 person found this helpful
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- tommee3d
- 07-20-21
Fantastic
Well written, educational, and captivating! It’s amazing how much we can understand through the fossil record and through the stories of those who embark on journeys across the world to find those fossils.
1 person found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 04-13-21
Loved this book.
This book is clear and fascinating. It sparked my imagination and uplifted me to learn about the diverse experiments of bepedalism in hominins. It's amazing to learn about different ages on the earth and the creatures that wandered on it. I enjoyed learning about other animals bipedality, such as the Carolina Butcher and the Giant Shortfaced kangaroo.
1 person found this helpful
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- Judy
- 12-07-22
Okay
Author DeSilva takes us along on a lengthy slog through man's earliest ancestors and cousins. Each chapter contains interesting revelations buried in droning background material reminiscent of high school textbook studies. We learn, for instance, that Homo sapiens was bipedal from the get-go, trashing the commonly held belief that we started out on all fours and learned to stand upright in order to be able to spot predators or prey across the grasslands of Africa.
I'm glad that I read the book because it has enlightened me; I'm also glad that I've finished it.
Narration is good, especially of commonly mispronounced words such as Neanderthal.
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- Barb Freeman
- 09-08-22
Fascinating read
Enjoyed the depth of knowledge. Love learning! Saw Lucy when in Eastern Africa. Great to ponder on where we came from and who we have become
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Performance
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Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened.
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Interesting but thin. ANNOYING narration
- By MSB on 04-10-20
By: Neil Shubin
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The Deep History of Ourselves
- The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
- By: Joseph LeDoux
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This pause-resisting survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.
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Skip the first 40 chapters
- By Trebla on 09-30-19
By: Joseph LeDoux
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Out There
- A Scientific Guide to Alien Life, Antimatter, and Human Space Travel (For the Cosmically Curious)
- By: Michael Wall
- Narrated by: Will Collyer
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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We've all asked ourselves the question. It's impossible to look up at the stars and NOT think about it: Are we alone in the universe? Books, movies, and television shows proliferate that attempt to answer this question and explore it. In Out There, Space.com senior writer Dr. Michael Wall treats that question as merely the beginning, touching off a wild ride of exploration into the final frontier. He considers, for instance, the myriad of questions that would arise once we do discover life beyond Earth (an eventuality which, top NASA officials told Wall, is only drawing closer).
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Thought provoking
- By kubany on 03-22-19
By: Michael Wall
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The Second Brain
- A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine
- By: Michael Gershon
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 15 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Michael Gershon has devoted his career to understanding the human bowel (the stomach, esophagus, small intestine, and colon). His 30 years of research have led to an extraordinary rediscovery: Nerve cells in the gut that act as a brain. This "second brain" can control our gut all by itself. Our two brains - the one in our head and the one in our bowel - must cooperate.
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Better read than listened to.
- By Anonymous User on 07-19-19
By: Michael Gershon
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Through Two Doors at Once
- The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality
- By: Anil Ananthaswamy
- Narrated by: René Ruiz
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself - and continues to almost 200 years later. Through Two Doors at Once celebrates the elegant simplicity of an iconic experiment and its profound reach. With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world, through history and down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. It is the most fantastic voyage you can take.
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Excellent exposition of the conundrum
- By GLYNN A on 08-14-18
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The Map of Knowledge
- A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found
- By: Violet Moller
- Narrated by: Susan Duerden
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The foundations of modern knowledge - philosophy, math, astronomy, geography - were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean....
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Terrible narration.
- By nathan535 on 11-05-19
By: Violet Moller
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Meteorite
- How Stones from Outer Space Made Our World
- By: Tim Gregory
- Narrated by: Tim Gregory
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Explore the universe and immerse yourself in the story of our solar system, planet, and life through meteorites.
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One of the best Earth creation books ever
- By Dipam on 07-07-22
By: Tim Gregory
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The Great Unknown
- Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
- By: Marcus du Sautoy
- Narrated by: Marcus du Sautoy
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since the dawn of civilization, we have been driven by a desire to know - to understand the physical world and the laws of nature. But are there limits to human knowledge? Are some things simply beyond the predictive powers of science? Or are those challenges the next big discovery waiting to happen?
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Science Museum in a Book (this is a compliment :)
- By Mike on 04-26-17
By: Marcus du Sautoy
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The Intelligence Trap
- Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes
- By: David Robson
- Narrated by: Simon Slater
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Smart people are not only just as prone to making mistakes as everyone else - they may be even more susceptible to them. This is the "intelligence trap", the subject of David Robson's fascinating and provocative book. The Intelligence Trap explores cutting-edge ideas in our understanding of intelligence and expertise, including "strategic ignorance", "meta-forgetfulness", and "functional stupidity."
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Great except for one big thing
- By J. S. Noel on 12-05-22
By: David Robson
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The World in a Grain
- The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
- By: Vince Beiser
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other - even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. And, incredibly, we're running out of it. The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it - and sometimes, even kill for it.
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History given is only reason it gets 2 stars.
- By Dennis on 07-23-19
By: Vince Beiser
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This Isn't Happening
- Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century
- By: Steven Hyden
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1999, as the end of an old century loomed, five musicians entered a recording studio in Paris without a deadline. Their band was widely recognized as the best and most forward-thinking in rock, a rarefied status granting them the time, money, and space to make a masterpiece. But Radiohead didn't want to make another rock record. Instead, they set out to create the future.
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Amazing read but…
- By Alexis Feldman on 06-01-21
By: Steven Hyden
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Never out of Season
- How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future
- By: Rob Dunn
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance - once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time.
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Fascinating + Roadmap to Destroy Things
- By Sarah Garland on 07-02-22
By: Rob Dunn