Abstract
Adaptations for effective upright posture permeate our body design. This allows us to seek evidence for the development of bipedal posture among the early hominins, especially australopiths. Bipedalism did not evolve in a straightforward manner. It appeared independently in several Miocene lineages. Functional aspects of the skeleton have been compared in detail. The australopith form is neither human-like nor intermediate with chimpanzees, but unique in several ways. Furthermore, there are differences among australopiths suggesting varying degrees of retained arboreality.
Despite a century and a half of hypothesizing, the question of why our ancestors became bipedal does not have a simple answer. Bipedalism was not a single event, but a multi-step process with several endpoints. The explanation relates to the general primate predisposition to orthograde postures, hominoid adaptations for arboreal climbing, and a need to improve efficiency as the hominin niche became more terrestrially oriented.
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Langdon, J.H. (2022). The Evolution of Bipedality. In: Human Evolution. Springer Texts in Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14157-7_8
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