If you want to understand human evolution, walking on two legs is critical. We have evidence that probably around 7 million years ago, when we split off from the chimpanzee lineage, our very earliest ancestors were bipeds of some sort. It's clear that the initial cause that made the human lineage go on a different path from our ape cousins was bipedalism. Q: Why look at walking and running from an evolutionary biology perspective? Upright (Credit: Cherylramalho/Dreamstime). Knuckle walkers expend twice as much energy as humans, who adapted to save energy by standing ĭiscover talked to Lieberman about how walking and running helped shape the human body, the pros and cons of shoes, and what evolution can teach us about staying fit and healthy in the modern world. More recently, Lieberman’s research continues to investigate the consequences of the modern, post-industrial lifestyle being out of step with how humans evolved to be physically active - an idea he explores in Exercised. An avid runner himself (he’s run the Boston Marathon 11 times), he personally has been running in minimalist footwear for years. Lieberman was nicknamed “the barefoot professor” after his 2010 study in Nature suggested that running barefoot or in minimally padded footwear - the way our ancestors did - typically results in a runner landing on their forefoot, which may protect the foot from high-impact injuries. He has written two books on the subject for a general audience: The Story of the Human Body in 2014 and Exercised in 2021. Lieberman and his team at the Harvard University Skeletal Biology and Biomechanics Lab use evidence from the fossil record, biomechanics experiments in the lab and field research to develop models that explain the evolution of human physical activity. When our ancestors adapted to getting around on two limbs instead of four, that adjustment made its mark on nearly every part of the human body from head to toe (and even our butts). According to human evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, though, those activities are central to understanding what makes us human.
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