Humanity's Baby Steps Happened in the Trees

Between four and eight million years ago, our ancestors dropped down from the trees, set off on all fours into the African savannah, spent an intermediate period dragging their knuckles -- as chimps do today -- and eventually acquired the ability to walk upright.

So goes the conventional wisdom. But a new theory, based on observations of organgutans -- the primate species that moves most like us -- suggest that people first learned to walk in the trees, skipping the knuckle-dragging stage altogether.

Prof Robin Crompton, from the School of Biomedical Sciences at
Liverpool University, said: "We found that orang-utans walking bipedally on springy branches act much like athletes running on springy tracks. They use extended postures of knee and hip to give them straighter legs.

"Upright walking evolved in the ancestors of all apes, including humans, as a means of foraging for food in the small branches of the tropical forests and these techniques were later used by human ancestors to allow them to adapt to walking on two feet on the ground.

Early humans 'learnt to walk in the trees' [Telegraph]
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Image: Tim Parkinson*