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April 30 (UPI) – According to a new study, the monkeys adapted to the ground just as the first human beings emerged. Life on the ground, determined researcher Thomas Prang, preceded human bipedalism.
The human body is particularly well adapted to the task of walking and running, the result of many evolutionary factors. The human foot is particularly unique, with a big toe devoid of monkey-like grip, but a full arch with spring-like energy.
But how did humans develop their feet? What species of monkeys have they borrowed? Now scientists have answers.
"Our unique form of human locomotion came from an ancestor who evolved in the same way as the great African apes, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas," Prang, a PhD student in biological anthropology at NYU, said in a statement. "In other words, the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos was an African monkey who probably had adaptations to life on the ground in any way and frequency that this is."
To better understand what the oldest common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees might look like, Prang studied the relationship between locomotion and morphology of primate foot bones. Prang also closely analyzed the morphology of Ardipithecus ramidus – or "Ardi" – a 4.4 million year old human ancestor hailing from Ethiopia.
Prang's research has shown that the apes from which the earliest humans evolved have already adapted to life on the ground and adopted some of the characteristics that would be essential for human bipedalism.
"As a result, humans evolved from an ancestor who had adaptations to live on the ground, perhaps not so different from those found in African monkeys," said Prang. "These results suggest that human bipedalism was derived from a locomotion pattern similar to that of living African monkeys, which contrasts with the original interpretation of these fossils."
Previous interpretations of the Ardi foot bones suggested that the foot of the primitive species resembled more than that of a monkey that did not resemble that of chimpanzees or gorillas. Such an interpretation suggests that many traits common to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans have evolved independently.
Conversely, Prang's work, published this week in eLife, suggests that the underlying morphology of human bipedalism has profound evolutionary roots – roots shared by the parents of human primates.
"Humans are part of the natural world and our locomotor adaptation – bipedalism – can not be understood outside of its natural evolutionary context," Prang said. "Large-scale evolutionary changes do not seem to occur spontaneously, they are rooted in deeper stories revealed by the study of fossil records."
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