Archive for April 2009
Human Ancestors Were Not Good Tree Climbers, Said Researcher
A new study by Jeremy DeSilva, anthropologist at Worcester State College in Massachusetts suggests that human ancestors may not have been good tree climbers. He suggests that our ancestors traded in arboreal adaptations to evolve bipedality.
By recording how wild chimpanzees climb tree in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, DeSilva found that chimpanzees flex their ankles 45 degrees from normal resting position while modern humans flex their ankles a maximum of 20 degrees while walking. Flexing any more than that and a modern human’s ankle will suffer serious injuries.
DeSilva then compared the ankle joint, the tibia and the talus, in great apes and fossil hominins between 4.12 million to 1.53 million years old. He found that all of the hominin ankle joints resembled those of modern humans rather than those of apes, suggesting that this joint “form” took on its current configuration early in human evolution.
Read the full ScienceNOW article.
Originally posted on The Prancing Papio.
Introducing A New Guest Blogger, Raymond Ho
As you may have noticed, it has been rather silent here for the last 5 months. I’m happy to break the silence with most excellent news of a new guest blogger to Anthropology.net & Primatology.net, Raymond Ho, of The Prancing Papio. I’ve been an avid reader of Raymond’s blog ever since he started it earlier this year. His balance in being thorough, inquisitive, and consistent has kept me subscribed.
For a little background on Raymond, he’s currently an undergraduate Biological Anthropology student at CUNY, Queens College and is expected to graduate next month. As you can tell from the title of his personal blog, he’s passionate about primatology, especially grooming. His senior honors thesis compares grooming between hamadryas baboons and gelada baboons. But he does write on many anthropological topics as well, such as paleoanthropology — one of my favorite topics!
I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Raymond for accepting to blog here. I’m very grateful, actually, especially since I’m still an inactive member of this site and hope that he and others will keep this site ticking in my absence. If you haven’t followed his blog, I suggest you do. He’ll continue posting there and here.
