![]() ![]() “Any explanation for why we became bipedal must also take into consideration that, compared with quadrapedalism, bipedal locomotion is slow, clumsy, and fraught with opportunities for injury. In their book From Lucy to Language, Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar put it this way: “So in adopting such a restricted form of locomotion humans must have had other means of defence against attack, and yet it seems that bipedalism was one of the first, if not the first, distinctly human attribute to evolve.” “Bipedalism is unusual because it slows us down and at first sight makes us vulnerable to faster-moving predators.” “If there was any one key initial adaptation, a spark that set the human lineage off on a separate evolutionary path from apes, it was likely bipedalism, the ability to walk and stand on two feet.”Ĭhris Stringer and Peter Andrews, in their book The Complete World of Human Evolution, write: In looking at bipedalism from an evolutionary viewpoint, Daniel Lieberman, in his book The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease, writes: “The adoption of bipedalism is uniquely human only insofar as it occurred on a primate frame, with considerable independence of movements of the pelvic and shoulder girdles.” In his entry on human nature in The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology, Jonathan Marks writes: Bipedalism is generally considered to be the central feature of being human and has consequences for much of our anatomy. Unlike other primates, humans are bipedal meaning that we walk on two legs. Instead of having to expend energy on trying to stabilize the upper body, humans use their energy for forward motion. Sober humans, on the other hand, have a striding gait in which there is little sway. Their swaying walk reminds some observers of the gait of an inebriated human. When they do walk on two legs, chimpanzees waddle: they walk with their legs far apart and their bodies sway from side to side. When they walk, they are on all fours, supporting their weight on the knuckles of their hands. Chimpanzees and gorillas are quadrupeds which have a form of walking on the ground generally called knuckle-walking. ![]()
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