Did you know that Humans walking on two legs consume only a quarter of the energy that chimpanzees use while “knuckle-walking” on all fours?.In the trees, infant primates cling to their mothers and branches from birth. Did you know that we still carry some traits from the tree-dwelling past? Have you ever noticed what will happen to the baby’s tiny fingers when you place your finger under his toes or fingers (on his palm)? They will curl those digits around it to get a grip.The veins extend because the heart doesn’t have the pressure that it needs to pump the blood all the way back up. That’s one reason why some people get varicose veins*. It’s much harder on the heart and its vessels to pump blood to the entire body organs.Bipedalism put also pressure on our joints (knees).The vertical position of the spine makes it more prone to back injuries and problems. After moving from quadrupeds to being bipeds, more pressure was put on our spine.It enabled early humans to appear larger and more intimidating.It improves our ability to cool-off while reducing energy costs associated with moving about.Walking is also more energy-efficient, and it’s easier to do a lot of things if you aren’t stepping on your own hands.It may have been a key step that led our ancestors’ brains to grow.Allows long-distance walking, endurance running and navigation.Walking upright freed the hands for carrying and manipulating tools, stretch for fruit in trees and use their hands for social display and communication.Humans evolution Advantages of being bipeds And, that gave us a very different profile from the quadrupeds we left behind. We developed the right muscles and the right skeletal system to facilitate walking on two legs.Our legs grow longer, our feet get shorter and our toes lined up with one another.The spine curved into an S-shape helping to support the head and creating balance.The pelvis shortened, the thighs became longer, the angle of the thigh bone changed to point inwards allowing the knees to come together under our center of gravity! This allows us to stand for a long period without getting tired.Our ancestors went through many body modifications to shift from four legs to two: What happened to the human body during the transformation into bipeds? Standing up exposes the body to greater wind flows keeping us cool. Moreover, the hot weather in Africa forced our ancestors to walk on two legs, reducing the body surface exposed to the sun and raises the body away from the hot ground. They also needed to carry what they hunted to their habitat. Later, they shifted their hunting strategies to throw weapons so they can take bigger and fast-moving prey. In an environment with fewer trees, standing up was essential to allow our ancestors to see over long grass so they can hunt and later. The new habitat required the tree-climbers to become more adept at walking on land. Our ancestors left forests and moved out onto savannahs and patches of woodland. Many years ago, Africa began to lose some of its forests and vast grasslands grew. Scientists believe that those changes happened due to climate change. Those trees are thought to have covered much of Africa at the time.įootprints Fossil How and why did these changes occur? Scientists think that our early human predecessors sometime between 13 million and six million years ago lived high in the trees. However, they all agreed that permanently standing up opened up new opportunities for our ancestors to touch, explore, pick up, throw and learn. Scientists do not exactly know why we became bipeds and why humankind abandoned life on all fours. Footprints are the earliest indisputable evidence that our distant ancestors had shifted from four legs to two, becoming “ bipeds“. Those footprints go back to 3.66 million years ago, a long time before our own species of human, Homo Sapiens existed. Pressed into hardened volcanic ash, were found 3 footprints of early humans. They were found in the bed of a dried-up river in the north of Tanzania. Those fossils were the most suggestive of our evolutionary past. There is fossil evidence that suggests our ancestors have been walking upright for at least six million years.
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