Abstract

Bipedalism is the most important physical property distinguishing human beings, and the shift to bipedalism about four million years ago unlocked the potential for toolmaking, vocal language, social elaboration, and the technological discoveries which propelled our species to the pinnacle of the animal kingdom. Human bipedalism has been studied from a physical anthropological point of view, but the emphasis was placed first on the skeletal structure of fossil hominids and primates, which are selsom excavated. Bipedal behavior has not been studied using the best of physiological methods for some time. Soon after World War II, Japanese anthropologists began taking a functional approach to human posture and locomotion: electromyographic methods were applied for the first time to kinesiological analyse of human walking by Shiro KONDO in the late 1940s. The same methodoly has been extended to experiments on nonhuman primates, in a variety of natural and artifical settings, in order to put the laboratory data into the historical context of primate evolution and adaptation. In this volume, scientists from various specialties describe their recent work, focusing on the origin of human bipedalism, the central theme of human evolution, from the base of biostructural and morphophysiological methodologies. Klappentext