Dr. Liza Shapiro studies locomotion in a variety of primates, from lemurs to humans. Lemurs are one of the living animals that most closely resembles some of the earliest primates that lived about 60 million years ago, from which all of today's varied primate species, from bush babies to humans, evolved. Human bipedalism involved a remarkable evolutionary transformation of both skeleton and musculature, but it also built on a foundation of adaptations for upright posture that we share with many other primates. Excerpted from an interview filmed for Evolution: "Great Transformations" |
