John Green: More on Bipedalism in Higher Primates

In the last two chapters he deals with what I have mentioned, that there is no fossil evidence that any higher primates were ever quadrupeds. All the fossil evidence shows that they all walked upright. There are no fossils leading to the chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla, which walk half upright today, and their spines prove that they were originally bipedal.

Remember that not long ago humans were believed to have split off from the gorillas and chimpanzees some millions of years ago, but then immune reactions and DNA established that gorillas split off from the basic stock first, while chimpanzees and bonobos remain very closely related to humans, not to.gorillas. This cuts short the time that humans were supposed to have had to come down from the trees and evolve into bipeds. The evidence is plain that Homo Sapiens as well as the others arbitrarily called Homo or Australopithicus or Gigantopithecus etc. Follow the basic upright pattern and it is the gorillas and the chimps that are evolving a new way of walking. Both are called knucklewalkers, but the adaptions that allow them to use their arms in walking are not the same, while the orangs, even though they are much more evolved to be tree dwellers, follow a very different pattern which includes considerable bipedalism and the gibbons, although always in the trees, are fully bipedal.

Someone many years ago came up with the theory that humans were quadrupeds that became upright through living in trees and then came down to earth, continued to walk upright and evolved feet adapted for walking on two legs. That theory became almost universally accepted a long time ago and is considered by most scientists dealing with such matters to be established fact. I expect Filler isn’t the only sceptic, but he is the one with unique qualifications and the guts to challenge the prevailing belief in a book.

I happen to have an atlas of primate anatomy with detailed drawings of vertebrae of baboon, chimpanzee and human. It showed immediately that human and chimp vertebrae are almost the same while those of the baboon, a real quadruped, are basically different. Since humans and chimps are designed to support their weight with a stack of vertebrae that rest on top of each other they have no attachments on the main bone column for locking the spine together in a horizontal position. You don’t need an atlas, you can look up illustrations on the Internet.