New Research Suggests Human Ancestors Walked Fully Upright
New research suggests that the world’s most famous early human ancestor, nicknamed Lucy, could walk fully upright as well as living in trees.
It means her posture is not replicated in any living species today.
The individual, from the species Australopithecus afarensis, was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, with 40 per cent of her skeletal bones.
Scientists at the university of Cambridge have now digitally modeled her lower limb muscles.
They conclude that lucy could straighten her knee joints, enabling her to stand upright and inhabit grasslands – but also that her powerful leg muscles helped her live in trees like modern apes.
Lucy lived more than three million years ago.
Her lawyer, frank mwela, said that he plans to appeal against the verdict because his client was not tested to confirm if she indeed had sexually transmitted diseases.
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The new theory still needs to be tested against the fossil record, and it brings up more questions than answers.
For example, the findings don’t shed any light on why early humans, rather than apes, first began walking on two feet.
Humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor roughly 6 to 8 million years ago but evolved very differently from that point forward, per Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
And the theory also doesn’t explain how some animals that do not live in trees, such as kangaroos, evolved to walk on two feet.
Moving forward, the scientists also hope to conduct further research to understand more about why the Issa Valley chimpanzees spend so much time in the canopy.
“Bipedalism is a defining feature of the human lineage and is the first thing to separate our fossil ancestors from other apes,” says study co-author Rhianna Drummond-Clarke, a biological anthropologist at the University of Kent in England, to Popular Science.
“Understanding why it evolved is thus key to understanding what made us human.”
