Solvitur Ambulando: Why Humans Walk Extraordinary Distances Together Serving Abstract Ends

Abstract

Human walking is a socially-embedded and shaped biological adaptation: it frees our hands, make our minds mobile and is deeply health-promoting. Yet, today, physical inactivity is an unsolved, major public health problem. However, globally, tens of millions of people annually undertake ancient, significant, and enduring traditions of physiologically- and psychologically-arduous walks (pilgrimages) of days-to-weeks extent. Pilgrim walking is celebrated, discussed, and analysed in important literary, historical, and religious works as a defining human activity: one requiring weighty commitments of time, action, and belief, as well as community support. Paradoxically, human walking is most studied on treadmills, not ‘in the wild’. While mechanistically vital, treadmill studies of walking cannot, in principle, address why humans walk extraordinary distances together for abstract ends, or provide the means to bring much-needed physical activity back into our everyday lives.Pilgrim walkers provide a rich ‘living laboratory’ bridging literary, historical, and religious inquiries, to progressive theoretical and empirical investigations of human walking serving abstract ends. Pilgrims offer advantages for causal investigations: they vary demographically, and they undertake arduous journeys on precisely-mapped routes of tracked, titrated, doses and durations on terrain of varying difficulty, allowing controlled investigations from molecular to cultural levels of analysis. Here, using a novel, naturalistic, framework, we examine how pilgrim walking might shape personal, social, and transcendental processes, revealing potential mechanisms supporting the socially-embedded body and brain in motion, and beyond, to how pilgrim walking might offer some potential solutions for physical inactivity in society at large.