Why We Walk the Way We Do?

No other creature walks the way we do. Why?

Try swinging the same arm and leg when you walk--right leg, right arm together. It’s an awkward feeling.  That’s because we never do it. When stepping forward with your right leg, you swing your left arm forward, and vice-versa. But why?

It goes back to the days when our ancestors still walked on all fours. In order to move forward efficiently, your average dog or cat, lion or bear, or gorilla have their back left foot pushing forward as their right forepaw is planted on the ground stabilizing them while their other two limbs move forward for the next step. It keeps the prone body balanced and progressing in a straight line.

The first humans, our distant ancestors who lived in both forested and savanna environments in Africa, retained this old trait even as they began to walk upright. The transition from knuckle-walking, gorilla style, and full-time bipedalism took millions of years, and during that transition we retained the way we walk today: right hand and arm (forepaw and leg) forward, left leg back.

It turns out that this approach in our perambulations does have advantages even today. A 2009 study at Delft University in the Netherlands found that if we don’t swing our arms, we use 12 percent more efficient when walking, and if we swing our arms with our legs we are 26 percent more efficient. Other studies had already shown that animals that walk on all fours use 50 percent more energy than upright walking, which is one of the reasons that when our ancestors learned to walk upright, they stood a better chance of surviving in savanna environments. Far more energy was needed to find food in Africa’s open grasslands than in its thick forests so it was important to cover more ground more efficiently. And in time, that’s precisely what happened. And that explains why we walk the way we do.

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