Whenever I hear the word “uprightness” or it is triggered by some other means, whether in the swinging stance of a walker, the moment by moment balance in movement or whether by the five pointed star (pentagram) on its “feet”, I get this little packet of resonant feeling. That “resonant feeling” is the signal that the connotations of things, words, activities is active. With language users, things are never simple and words are never conscribed by their denotative meaning. Words like “upright” carry multiple meanings and many of them will not be found at dictionary.com. For me, one of the connotations of “uprightness” has something to do with how human beings first came to walk bipedally.

Things, whether words or symbols, carry a (usually) hidden payload of meaning. The specific content of that “payload” is contingent: what books you read, who you meet, what culture you were born into, what films you see, what languages you have learnt to speak, what accidents occur around you, what superstitions you carry, what your parents told you was true. For example, someone I know says that for her, “uprightness” is mostly to do with morality; the word carries a sense of surety and an image of some human being standing tall in his or her goodness. Not for me. Paradoxically, the word triggers an image of a human male slightly crouched over while another postures, flinging his arms back, expanding his torso, his leg stance wide, exposing his groin to view. For this bit of hilarity, I blame Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.

Sheets-Johnstone, in her book The Roots of Thinking, suggests a theory that recognizes the primacy of human movement and body form in the conceptual development of the traits we think of as quintessentially human – things like our bidedalism, but also our concepts, things like art, philosophy and love. Essentially, one trigger for our conceptual evolution was the change in how we saw the world. Literally. Once we got up on two feet, lifted our heads higher from the earth, we got our eyes facing out to the horizon more and more each day. It changed what we saw, what was fodder for our thinking origins not to mention what it did to our pelvis, and the capacity for human females to give live birth to those mutations – big-brained babies. I mean who knows if our lineage produced the occasional big-brained child prior to bipedalism? What’s true is that now matter how potentially good a mutation is for the evolutionary line, it means nothing if the young can’t be born alive. Whatever the truth is, the fossil record strongly suggests that bipedalism was a watershed in the evolutionary potential of Homonids like Ardipithecus and Australopithecus.

The thing I find most delightful about the whole idea of uprightness being the genesis of our evolution into the intelligent, aware beings we are today is what Sheets-Johnstone says may have triggered the upright stance. What she says is that sexual display in males was probably the impulse for this shift. Such a wonderful idea! It reached into my mind and grabbed my attention with such force that I felt it wrap its conceptual arms securely around my idea of how we got to be this way so that I know it is unlikely ever to let go. And now, for me, blown away is the primacy of the moral connotation suggested by that acquaintance of mine.

Think Sheets-Johnstone’s idea is bollocks? Male chimpanzee displays, whether sexual or aggressive, are often augmented by the on-two-feet stance. It makes them suddenly appear bigger, and therefore more intimidating, more powerful. The stance displays the penis as opposed to the on-all-fours position where male sexual traits are hidden. Now think about what a rush of excitement and sense of power does to a penis. It does the same thing in chimps. So when they stand up and display, it isn’t their chests that they are really showing off. Feeling powerful and sexual arousal go hand-in-hand. Think about male ritual displays – war games, sports, etc. – and the reputation those “warriors” have when it comes to women. Think about suddenly facing and surviving danger and what it does to the libido. Aggression, power and desire are linked in the Hominid line and it shows in our behaviours and in our bodily responses.

Another interesting thing: in the on-all-fours position of most primates, the displayed genitalia are female. With the advent of bipedalism, the primary sexual region of the female is hidden and the male’s is frontally displayed. I wonder if this change explains the sexualization of the female breast? We want something to swing too? Especially having gotten used to being the one to display — seriously now, display has a real purpose. Perhaps the changes brought about by uprightness required some adjustments in the female form and male attitude to that form in order to accomplish the original primate goal associated with genital display in females. Of course much of that changed with the advent of hidden oestrus but, I suspect, that also evolved as a response to bipedalism.

As an aside, remember the famous footprints from eastern Africa? When I see graphic representations of the ones who made the footprints, it looks like a male and female pair bond. It may not be a true representation, but still, those pictures, along with Sheets-Johnstone’s theory, made me wonder if hidden oestrus, and indirectly bipedalism, wasn’t the environmental impetus to the development of human pair bonding, which contrasts so much with chimp and bonobo sexual and relationship organization. I mean, what’s a man to do when he can’t tell when a woman is receptive by the colour of her butt? He has to convince her to stay with him so that when she is receptive, he’ll be right there.

I imagine the difference a lack of uprightness would have made to how we perceive the world. Would our ideas of proper “gender” displays for each sex have different content? How many genders would we have? Is the sudden (on an evolutionary timescale) hiddeness of primary female genitalia the reason that our breasts have suddenly become—compared to chimps or other primates—enlarged? Is the use of the penis in a permanently visible display the reason why the human penis is so much larger than any other primate’s?

Uprightness. Stars. Evolution. Spiritual discipline. Ethical choices. Wants and needs. What the body knows. They are all connected in my head, but whatever the term denotes in any given sentence, always underpinning it is that image of the two males in the middle of a symbolic display of evolutionary humanity. Morality, our capacity to think at all, the concepts we form, discard, renegotiate, all these are pinned on the what I have learnt about the origin of our uprightness.