Macaque Monkey Goes Totally Bipedal

Freshly Exhumed writes "Add another bonus point for the Darwinians/evolutionists. A macaque at the Safari Park Zoo in Ramat Gan, Israel has recovered from a near-fatal illness in an unusual way: she has switched exclusively to walking on her hind legs. Given theories of human history that stress the effect of disease on events and changes, as in William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, what if an illness was the cause of the shift to bipedal motion by our evolutionary ancestors, and rote imitation by offspring or another set of circumstances locked it in? No matter, this could be a fascinating study of the macaque's altered brain functions."

Comments

Re:A question for evolutionists

[edremy]

Intelligence always adaptive? Nope. Any organism is a trade off between a huge variety of factors- which you spend your energy budget on depends on your overall survival strategy. A perfectly good evolutionary strategy is to simply breed like crazy and not worry much about survival of any one offspring- why bother with brains when your gonads work well?

You only need to be smart enough to survive until you can breed. Look around among your fellow humans- it don't take much to reach that point.

Re:Question to the anthropologist nerds...

[Yaztromo]

Has anyone done a study on whether human bipedalism is due to the behavior learned from surrounding people or if there are practical reasons for why we hardly ever walk on all fours?

If you take a look at how modern human bodies are constructed, the fact that we're bipedial by nature (as opposed to nurture) is pretty obvious.

Quadripeds don't walk on their rear knees, but on either their feet or their toes. Humans can't do this due to the differences in proportion between our arms and legs. Sure we can crawl on all fours -- but that's quite a bit different from being a real quadriped.

Mind you, at one point in time during human evolution things were probably different -- there would have had to have been an intermediate stage. The fossil record would appear to back this up, as there are hominids which have shorter legs and longer arms.

Yaz.

Re:Bigger brains...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Not true.

The part of the brain resposible for balance is the Cerebellum. It really hasn't changed much since we left the trees. Various structural changes in our skull allowed the cerebrum (frontal lobe) of the brain to grow larger.

Neanderthals and many species of proto-humans had flat foreheads, but walked upright.