A new study provides support for the hypothesis that walking on two legs, or bipedalism, evolved because it used less energy than quadrupedal knucklewalking.

David Raichlen, an assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Arizona, conducted the study with Michael Sockol from the University of California, Davis, who was the lead author of the paper, and Herman Pontzer from Washington University in St. Louis.

Raichlen and his colleagues will publish the article, Chimpanzee locomotor energetics and the origin of human bipedalism in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) during the week of July 16. The print issue will be published on July 24.

Bipedalism marks a critical divergence between humans and other apes and is considered a defining characteristic of human ancestors. It has been hypothesized that the reduced energy cost of walking upright would have provided evolutionary advantages by decreasing the cost of foraging.

For decades now researchers have debated the role of energetics and the evolution of bipedalism, said Raichlen. The big problem in the study of bipedalism was that there was little data out there.

The researches collected metabolic, kinematic and kenetic data from five chimpanzees and four adult humans walking on a treadmill. The chimpanzees were trained to walk quadrupedally and bipedally on the treadmill.

Humans walking on two legs only used one-quarter of the energy that chimpanzees who knuckle-walked on four legs did. On average, the chimpanzees used the same amount of energy using two legs as they did when they used four legs. However, there was variability among chimpanzees in how much energy they used, and this difference corresponded to their different gaits and anatomy.

We were able to tie the energetic cost in chimps to their anatomy, said Raichlen. We were able to show exactly why certain individuals w
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Contact: Lori Harwood
harwoodl@email.arizona.edu
520-626-3846
University of Arizona
16-Jul-2007