Pros And Cons Of Bipedalism

How humans came to walk on 2 feet while any relative of homo sapiens like apes, chimpanzees, or monkeys walk quadrupedally has sparked many thoughts and questions about how this came to be, some scientists and anthropologists have produced educated guesses that are reinforced by evidence linking to their hypotheses being correct. The hypotheses of bipedalism and how it’s origins came to be are heavily debated still to this day. Some hypotheses are gaining more support than others as technology of modern times and recent discoveries are revealing many answers to questions as well as more questions with those answers. Some hypotheses that have a lot of support are the thermoregulation hypothesis; a hypothesis that suggests that bipedalism is

This theory shows the most support and least amount of weaknesses dealing with the evidence of the findings of archeologists and scientists. “Simply increasing body size would increase locomotor efficiency, because larger animals can more effectively use the elastic energy of tendons and muscles, and they also take fewer strides to cover a given distance than a smaller animal would.” (Britannica). This hypothesis’ strengths are fossil records showing that change for a more energy efficient design. The hypothesis also has recent studies showing that today’s humans just walking normally use a quarter of energy that a chimpanzee uses when knuckle-walking, though when the chimpanzees walked bipedally it used about the same amount of energy as when a chimpanzee knuckle-walks. This is both a weakness and strength as the correlation of energy efficiency between bipedalism and quadrupedal knucklewalking is clearly in support of bipedalism of having a more energy efficient trait. As well as fossil records of hominins showing the features of humans in the way their skeletal structures seem to adapt to bipedalism first and supporting other theories to strengthen this theory. The weakness of this hypothesis is that there is little data to

The evidence of each hypothesis does support itself, but evidence of other hypotheses has proven to disprove some theories, or just evidence found a later date after the hypothesis was proposed. The clearest and least problematic is that bipedalism was an evolutionary advantage mainly in that it was energy efficient in the locomotion, but is also supported that other traits were favorable along with bipedalism, and allowed for more advantages such as visual surveillance and thermoregulation, than disadvantages such as reduced speed and lack of mobility that each trait came from bipedalism. The advantages of bipedalism led to the trait being selected in the hominin traits and led to the homo sapiens that are found all over earth today. The advantages of bipedalism shown in these hypotheses show the traits that support bipedalism being the favorable trait appear to be the most convincing arguments until more evidence is discovered that reveals