Fossil Foot Bone Supports Humanlike Bipedalism

[Tank]

New View of Human Evolution? 3.2 Million-Year-Old Fossil Foot Bone Supports Humanlike Bipedalism in Lucy's Species

ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2011) â€" A fossilized foot bone recovered from Hadar, Ethiopia, shows that by 3.2 million years ago human ancestors walked bipedally with a modern human-like foot, a report that appears Feb. 11 in the journal Science, concludes. The fossil, a fourth metatarsal, or midfoot bone, indicates that a permanently arched foot was present in the species Australopithecus afarensis, according to the report authors, Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, together with William Kimbel and Donald Johanson, of Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins.

This is interesting in that it has been the case that the ancestors of chimps and humans were expected to be more chimp like than human-like, particularly with regard to walking. There appears to be a growing body of evidence that this was not the case and that the common ancestor walked upright, which if true poses more questions  

[Tank]

Evidence Indicates Humans' Early Tree-Dwelling Ancestors Were Also Bipedal

ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2010) â€" More than three million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans were still spending a considerable amount of their lives in trees, but something new was happening.

David Raichlen, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona School of Anthropology, and his colleagues at the University at Albany and City University of New York's Lehman College have developed new experimental evidence indicating that these early hominins were walking with a human-like striding gait as long as 3.6 million years ago...

Related article.

[grim-reaper]

If they were walking on two legs, they must have been spending a lot of time on the ground instead of up in the trees. But since they couldn't run as fast as four-legged animals, they must have been surviving by their wits. This may have been the beginning of human intelligence.

[ForTheLoveOfAll]

I love how the more evidence we get, the more questions tend to arise. Interesting article, though. Thank you.