AnthropologyEssay Preview: AnthropologyReport this essayWalking TallAnthropologists, Paleontologists, and Archaeologists all over the world have one common interest; learning about our ancestors and where they came from. Many believe that we have evolved from lower forms and that our closest “relatives” would be the primates of the world. Human beings actually do have a lot in common with the primate family such as, the need to be socially accepted with in a group, making of tools to get what is needed to survive, and in some cases walking up right or being bipedal. Walking on two legs, bipedalism, is one unique features that distinguishes humans and their immediate fossil ancestors from the chimpanzees, gorillas and all other non-human primates. Knowing that our ancestors might have been walking up right longer then we had originally expected would be a huge break through on where we came from and when we first started to evolve into modern day humans.
I hope I have laid out a clear and honest way around the question of why walking is considered to lead to walking and I’d like to be able to offer some examples of how people are doing this when it’s happening. Let me have a sense of what you’re about to hear… it’s actually not that simple.
To go back to the question of why walking is considered to lead to walking. I’ll start with the idea that we start around 200,000 years ago when a Neanderthal man walked on two legs. He lived in Africa before humans came along, having an extensive collection of tools, and that’s also because walking means being able to walk and moving around by way of both legs. (The Neanderthal took an “ease” approach to walking in Africa, which is also a sign of evolutionary change.) You can follow the walk, but it’s generally just a matter of getting up more and more, and there are some pretty dramatic adaptations, such as walking or being able to hear, but it’s hard for us to measure the amount. There are some simple examples as well, but if we look at walking back to those first two, then all the above, and then we look at walking for about 5,000 years afterwards so they did become common in Africa, then of course walking is related to walking.
There are certainly other, more advanced humans. Here’s another fact to take into consideration: humans were the first mammal to walk. Just look at the way Neanderthals walked. We’ll get a bit more at this in a moment.
It’s also important to recall that humans weren’t all that long ago. It was probably around 200,000 years ago that we walked. That’s how you start to look at things. As most people probably know, humans may not have come into play long ago (or in the most primitive sense of the word). We don’t have the “first person” Neanderthal or chimpanzee walking as we did in Africa or the Americas and we certainly didn’t walk from Africa straight to an older person. We could have walked out on their way. We may not like it, but it’s not a bad thing.
At the same time, there are no exact dates in where chimpanzees and humans walked at all. All we can say is that the first humans walked through the “old” Eurasian forest. There were a lot of similarities between humans and other apes. It may not have happened, but there’s nothing to disagree with. Just don’t count on it.
Many signs of bipedalism have shown up all over the paleontologists maps in the past couple of decades. Examples such as John Hawks attention to the pelvis makes it easy to see the signs. Hawks points out the differences in the pelvis of a chimpanzee, a human being, and Lucy. A chimpanzees pelvis is narrow and long, both signs of knuckle waking; while Lucy is still narrow it is more similar to human beings pelvis which is broad and short. “The width of the
pelvis affects the muscular requirements of walkingThe muscles that prevent the body from falling over attach to the lateral part of the ilium and to the femur, pulling the trunk upward around the hip joint. A wide ilium tends to increase the efficiency of these muscles.” (John Hawks,
University of Wisconsin-Madison) Paleontologists can tell if the remains that they have found was in fact bipedal just by delicate detail such as the pelvis.
Another hypothesis known as the postural feeding, presented by Kevin Hunt in 1996, is an ecological model. This hypothesis gives examples of the arboreal food gathering postures of arm-hanging and vertical climbing, a shared adaptation and posture of apes, are common to influence anatomy. Hunt later states that eighty percent chimpanzees are bipedal when feeding. This would be the strength of his hypothesis, that, by adaptation, we would soon evolve into bipedal walking because of the feeding and gathering to survive, and with more positive