[extropy-chat] Knuckle-walking (WAS: HISTORY: Solved & Unsolved Riddles)

[kevinfreels at hotmail.com]

For the past month or so I have been slowly compiling information for a
paper I am writing. This paper is probably useless since I am neither a
researcher, nor a college student, but I am doing it for myself.

One interesting tidbit of information I have found is that it is the tree
swingers that do most of the upright walking; particularly the orang-utan
and the chimps. When they come to the ground, they spend more time uprtight
than they do knuckle-walking. These are the primates which we share more DNA
with.

Also, there is some evidence that Lucy may have in fact been a
knuckle-walker. This is extremely interesting because she has chimp-like
features and ape-like features. Much of the established BELIEF is that she
is an ancestor of ours because of her upright posture. If she was a
knuckle-walker, she would be reduced to being just another primate. This
could really screw up what we think we know.

Another small bit I have run across is that only humans sleepwalk. I haven't
even begun to try to figure out what that means. Maybe I'll tackle it a bit
later.





----- Original Message -----
From: "Don Dartfield" <twodeel at jornada.org>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 12:27 PM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] HISTORY: Solved & Unsolved Riddles


> On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 CurtAdams at aol.com wrote:
>
> > It's unclear that our ancestors *ever* knuckle-walked like apes.
>
> So then, we may not have needed any big advantage to force us to evolve
> bipedalism -- evolution being parsimonious, and whatnot, we just used
> what was there.
>
> Of course, I guess that just pushes back the question of the advantages of
> bipedalism to our ancestors rather than to us...
>
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