History Of Bipedalism

As human beings, we always want to know how we have evolved over millions of years. We know that bipedalism is one of the most important developments of human. Even though bipedalism includes both walking and running, running is not considered to be a major factor in human evolution and changes in the anatomy. Running instead is viewed as a by-product of enhanced walking. However, recent studies by Bramble, Lieberman, and other scholars have suggested that the evolution of many features of human anatomy is an adaptation to long distance running (2004). They have also proposed that endurance running, which started out at an adaptation for scavenging and later for persistence hunting, is one of the key factors for early hominins to obtain high

However, this hypothesis has some criticisms about it. Pickering and Bunn criticizes that since the earliest homo lived in savanna-woodlands which are environments consisted of open grassland as well as dense vegetation and given that ungulates were the main prey at this time period, it is unlikely that persistence hunting would be effective (2007). On another hand, because of dense vegetation of the environment, the visibility is low. Therefore, it would reduce competition for early hominins, and they didn’t have to compete with other to reaching the food sources (Pickering et al., 2007)

First of all, it is important to understand the different mechanism between walking and running. Walking involves a mechanism called “inverted pendulum” in which the body center of mass “vaults over a relative extended leg, efficiently exchanges potential and kinetic energy out-of-phase with every step.” (Bramble et al., 2004) On the other hand, running requires what is called a mass-spring mechanism to exchange not only potential and kinetic energy, but also elastic energy stored in tendons and ligaments (Bramble et al., 2004). There are several differences between