Walking on two legs gave us a hand up
Anthropologists studying chimpanzees found that the apes, who usually walk on all fours, walk upright to free their hands when they need to monopolise hard-to-find resources in the face of fierce competition.
The team from the University of Cambridge and Kyoto University in Japan believe the benefit of “first come, first served” and getting a bigger share of scarce food supplies could, over a long period of time, have led some of our earliest “hominin” ancestors to evolve into “bipedal” primates walking on two legs permanently instead of four.
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Hide AdProfessor William McGrew, from Cambridge’s department of archaeology and anthropology, said: “Bipedality as the key human adaptation may be an evolutionary product of this strategy persisting over time. Ultimately, it set our ancestors on a separate evolutionary path.”