Tree-climbing or Knuckle walking? That is the Question.
Up until this week, the assumption was that homo sapiens evolved from a knuckle-walking primate ancestor. It seemed logical enough. Two of our wrist bones fused, thereby making it easier for our ancestors' gate to be more stable while knuckle-walking. But this week, the shattering news reached those of us interested in primates. Knuckle-walking? Not so! According to a new study published by Tracy Kivell and Daniel Schmidt, Independent evolution of knuckle-walking in African apes shows that humans did not evolve from a knuckle-walking ancestors. Homo sapiens, they say, descend from a tree-climbing ancestor who then came down and evolved to bipedalism. As a matter of fact, the authors argue the data they collected would indicate knuckle-walking evolved twice - thereby placing chimpanzees and bonobos in a different knuckle-walking category than gorillas. They found that the wrist bone structure of gorillas is very different from that of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest r...