What can lemurs tell us about the evolution of human bipedalism?
After all, the last common ancestor of humans and lemurs lived more than 50 million years ago. A: One reason it’s interesting to look at lemurs is because the earliest primate ancestors were probably very lemurlike. This could represent the kinds of movements you would see in an early primate ancestor. It also can just represent basic movements of a primate. We don’t know anything, really, about how the spine works together with the bones in a primate — nobody’s really been doing work on that. So you can look at the details of how the spine moves in relation to how the arms and legs move. How do primates incorporate their spine into their movements? Does the spine help them move their limbs in a certain way? So the limbs and the spine work together as a unit. Q: Why do they think the earliest primate ancestor was lemurlike? A: We have a great deal of fossils from the earliest primates. And although they were not directly ancestral to the lemurs, in terms of their adaptations they were
