Scientists have now identified two innovations that occurred long ago in the human evolutionary lineage that helped facilitate this defining characteristic. Bipedal locomotion - walking upright on two ...

A male western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo. The origin of human bipedalism has long been a hot topic among paleoanthropologists. At the very least it is seen as something ...

Few attributes of being human have attracted more intense thought than the simple fact that, unlike all other living mammals, we walk upright on two legs. Human bipedalism represents a major ...

The feet of primates function as grasping organs. But the adoption of bipedal locomotion – which reduces the ability to grasp – was a critical step in human evolution. Co-author Carrie S. Mongle, a ...

After an extensive study of evolutionary, anatomical and fossil evidence, a team of paleoanthropologists has narrowed down the number of tenable hypotheses to explain the origin of bipedalism and our ...

Human bipedalism may have evolved to protect babies too heavy to hang on our increasingly hairless bodies, says Brazilian physicist Lia Amaral. Apart from Homo sapiens, primate babies cling to the fur ...

The 2.8 million-year-old Australopithecus africanus "Taung child" skull was discovered in South Africa in 1925. Source: Wikimedia/Creative Commons New research further validates that bipedalism ...

Image: Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer/University of Zürich One of the things that makes our species unique is our exceptionally large brain relative to body size. Brain size more than ...

In recent decades, scientists have debated whether a seven-million-year-old fossil was bipedal—a trait that would make it the oldest human ancestor. A new analysis by a team of anthropologists offers ...

In today’s Academic Minute, Dr. Sarah Feakins of the University of Southern California explores the role environmental factors played in the origin of bipedalism. Dr. Feakins is an assistant professor ...

March 17 (UPI) --New research by anthropologists at Stony Brook University and the University of Texas at Austin confirm the human skull and bipedalism co-evolved. Scientists have previously linked ...