Re: Knucklewalking

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herwin@gmu.edu (Harry Erwin) wrote:

>I went through Tuttle's article on the subject in Primate Functional
>Morphology and Evolution. Very interesting! Orangs knucklewalk in addition
>to fist walking when they spend time on the ground. It's not as optimized
>as in Pan and Gorilla, where the hand has been modified to handle the
>stresses. On the other hand, I understand the small apes tend to be
>bipedal, since they don't need the forelimb support as much. Morphology
>tracks behavior, but at a distance! All this tells us that early hominids
>probably used knucklewalking at times (when forelimb support was needed)
>and abandoned it under some sort of selective pressure.

Harry,

It is pretty much agreed that hominids never knuckle-walked based
on the morphology of the bones of the hand (I can provide a detailed
reference if you would like).

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