A new analysis of leg and arm bones from an early hominin has reignited a fierce debate about when our ancestors began to walk upright
, who is also at the the University of Poitiers, and his colleagues, who still have access to the fossils, have published a full analysis of the femur as well as two forearm bones, including computed tomography scans to see their internal structure. It took so long partly because the team didn’t initially have the right expertise to analyse bones other than the skull, says Guy.
It is unknown if all the hominin bones came from the same individual or from several, but the researchers have assumed they belong toThe researchers compared thethigh and forearm bones with those from modern humans as well as chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and some extinct hominins and great apes.
“When on the ground they would have preferred to move bipedally. [When in trees] they would sometimes choose to use clambering. All the features point to this kind of behaviour,” says Guy.But Macchiarelli isn’t convinced. This is partly because the small angle the femur makes with the pelvis is more similar to that seen in quadrupedal apes, he says. “It’s mechanistically unstable to walk on two legs with a small angle.
Other primates that mainly walk on four legs occasionally stand up and walk on two, which could be whyhas some features of bipedalism, says Macchiarelli. “There’s a bipedal signal in any primate,” he says.at the Natural History Museum in London says the authors “make a good case” for bipedalism, but that the debate is likely to continue. “Unless you have a time machine, you can’t go back and see for yourself,” he says.
femur with a wider range of living and extinct primates. “It will be vital for independent teams of palaeoanthropologists to study these exciting fossils in the coming months,” she says.
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