Did Rock Climbing Help Us Start Walking Upright?
Stand Up Guy José-manuel Benitos via Wikimedia Commons A new theory suggests humans became bipedal so that we could scramble up rugged terrain. The story of how humans evolved from knuckle-walking primates to upright bipeds is still a matter of great debate among anthropologists. One of today's leading theories suggests that our forest-dwelling ancestors began walking on two feet as climate change stripped away the trees they lived in, forcing them to move to the ground. Another explanation for our bipedal evolution is that walking on two feet helped us carry babies, though that theory has been debunked. In a paper published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, researchers from the University of York and the Parisian Institut de Physique du Globe present yet another theory: that bipedalism evolved as a response to complex topography--places with active tectonics and rough, rocky terrain--in eastern and southern Africa during the Pliocene...