Why don’t chimpanzees, our closest primate cousins, have musical ability? Scientists at örebro University in Sweden hypothesize that our musical ability developed only after we had begun to walk upright. Writing in the journal Animal Cognition, researcher Matz Larsson suggests that our musicality stems from the need to deal with the disturbing sounds that are […]
Tag Archives | bipedalism
Hoarding may have led to human bipedalism
Detailed observations of chimpanzees indicate that upright walking may have emerged millions of years ago as an adaptation to be better able to carry scarce, high-quality foods and other resources. The new findings, in Current Biology, provide yet another hypothesis for the emergence of bipedalism, which other studies have linked to fighting ability, climate changeand […]
Two legs good, four legs bad – for beating the crap out of each other
Men can punch much harder when they stand on two legs and hit downward rather than when they are on all fours, giving tall, upright males a distinct fighting advantage, say University of Utah researchers who offer a controversial new theory on the origins of man’s bipedal posture. Their paper, in the journal PLoS ONE, […]
New evidence for hot climate forcing early humans to walk upright
The Turkana Basin in Kenya, where the average daily temperature has been around 100 degrees for the past 4 million years, may have been the place where humans first began to walk upright. Johns Hopkins University earth scientist Benjamin Passey says that the need to stay cool may explain why pre-humans learned to walk upright, […]