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About the episode
Being able to look over tall grass, use arms to lift objects: good reasons to walk on two legs instead of on all fours. But many of our ancestors lived largely in the trees and that’s not the most practical thing to do there, you might think.
The idea has long been that we started walking upright because our habitat changed. From lots of trees to more open plains. Then you spend more time on the pitch, that’s the idea and there are other challenges and that must have made us peel our fingers off at some point.
To determine if there is evidence for this, scientists studied wild chimpanzees in western Tanzania. This place looks like the place where the first people walked. Thousands of sightings were videotaped to see if this group of monkeys was indeed spending more time on the ground.
And they saw… no difference with their peers in wooded environments. They did not spend more time on the ground and did not move on two legs more often. If they did, it almost always happened in the trees. This study therefore does not endorse the habitat theory, to the surprise of these researchers.
The question: Why did we start walking upright? It therefore remains unanswered for the time being.
Read more: Early humans may have first walked upright in trees.
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