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Bipedalism and the Terrestrial Sifaka Theory
(no name) ((no email))
7 Jul 1995 15:35:06 GMT
While watching sifakas on a David Attenborough program, a few thoughts
occurred to me. First, sifakas seem to have proportionally longer legs than
most primates. Second, sifakas always travel bipedally on the ground. Is it
possible that the development of sifaka bipedalism could be similar to that
of the first hominids? Has this ever been considered? I'm not exactly sure of
the estimated size of the first hominids, so perhaps this idea is not very
realistic. How big are those hominids thought to be? And how big were the
most recent apes before the gap in the fossil record? In my semi-ignorant
state, it seems to me that sifaka bipedalism could potentially lead to some
reasonable speculations about our own bipedalism.
Dave B.
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