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Fossil ape hints at how walking on two feet evolved

Approximately 11.6-million-year-old fossils reveal an ape with arms suited to hanging in trees but human-like legs, suggesting a form of locomotion that might push back the timeline for when walking on two feet evolved.
  1. Tracy L. Kivell

    1. Tracy L. Kivell is at the School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NR, UK, and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

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Ever since Charles Darwin’s work provided the basis for understanding human evolution, there have been long-standing questions regarding when, why and how our early human ancestors begin to walk on two feet. The commitment to terrestrial bipedalism, characterized by skeletal adaptations for walking regularly on two feet, is a defining feature that enables the assignment of fossils to the hominin lineage — which comprises all species more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) or bonobos (Pan paniscus), our two closest living relatives. On the basis of fossil findings, some of which are more controversial than others1,2, the answer to the ‘when’ question is thought to be between 7 million and 5 million years ago at the end of the Miocene epoch (which lasted from about 23 million to 5 million years ago).

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Nature 575, 445-446 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03347-0

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