Spoiler alert: humans didn't invent walking. Many animals have evolved this method of getting around throughout Earth's history – the fossil record is scattered with walkers that were around long before us.
So, who invented walking? To answer this question, we must therefore consider an evolutionary lineup of inventors that reveal how animals started walking before us and what makes the human walk special. So, when did nature start walking?
Walking before humans
The invention of walking as we know it today began with our ancient aquatic relatives moving from water to land. However, the science of Earth's earliest land walkers is far from settled.
For example, a 360-million-year-old Devonian tetrapod called Ichthyostega used to be considered the first-ever walker until a 2012 study published in Nature concluded something totally different. It claimed these fish-like animals actually dragged their bodies around on two limbs in a movement quite unlike a walk.
"These early tetrapods probably moved in a similar way to living mudskipper fishes in which the front fins, or arms, are used like crutches to haul the body up and forward," study lead author Stephanie Pierce, then of the University of Cambridge and now a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said at the time.
Skip this problem period to around 290 million years ago, and the earliest evidence of efficient walking appears with the lizard-like Orobates in what is now Germany. Nearby and at roughly the same time, the first biped (animals using two legs for walking)emerged in the form of a small plant-eating reptile called Eudibamus cursoris.
E. cursoris didn't walk around on two legs but could run bipedally to quickly escape predators. More importantly, the species marks the beginning of a bipedal trend that led to a myriad of upright beasts strolling across Earth's surface by the reign of the dinosaurs (around 230-66 million years ago).
But while Tyrannosaurusrex and other bipedal dinosaurs certainly walked, they didn't look or move anything like us. The modern human-like walk came much later, long after the dinosaurs perished around 66 million years ago.
When did humans start walking on two legs?
Our ape ancestors began walking upright around 6 million years ago, but it wasn't until the emergence of Homo erectus around 1.9 million years ago that they evolved long legs and started walking as we do.
Our ancestors' anatomy underwent several changes on the road to true bipedalism. For example, their pelvises and lower limbs became reshaped, bringing their knees and feet underneath their bodies' centre of gravity, while changes to their skulls and spines forced a more upright posture with heads that sat directly on top of the backbone.
Because H. erectus and their relatives did the hard work of 'inventing' our method of walking through evolutionary adaptations, we Homo sapiens were born to do it when our species first emerged around 300,000 years ago.
Why did humans start walking on two legs?
Why early humans started walking upright is still an open question. Charles Darwin theorised that it freed up the use of our hands to start using weapons. While we now know that our ancestors were bipedal long before they were using tools, having hands would have been beneficial for carrying food. Walking upright also allowed humans to move across the landscape with great efficiency.
"We’re actually very energetically efficient at walking and standing," Patricia Kramer, an anthropology professor at the University of Washington, told the University of Washington Magazine in 2022. "That's a good clue that selection has worked on us for millions of years to make us good at this."
As for recreational walking, the kind of walking we do for exercise or to relax, that's probably a modern human invention. Going for a stroll became a popular pastime of Britain's upper classes in the 18th Century and was popularised in guidebooks and romanticised by writers of the time.
That said, we've been following our feet across the globe since the dawn of our existence, so it's unlikely wealthy Brits were the first to walk just for the love of walking.
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