Jane Goodall made an interesting observation about the chimpanzees she studied: she found that nearly 50% of the fatalities she observed were due to infants falling to the ground as the mothers they were clinging to moved through the trees. This was one of the bases of C Owen Lovejoy’s interesting (and largely unknown today in popular Paleoanthropology) theory that bipedality in the human lineage evolved primarily because it greatly reduced this source of mortality.
Jane Goodall made an interesting observation about the chimpanzees she studied: she found that nearly 50% of the fatalities she observed were due to infants falling to the ground as the mothers they were clinging to moved through the trees. This was one of the bases of C Owen Lovejoy’s interesting (and largely unknown today in popular Paleoanthropology) theory that bipedality in the human lineage evolved primarily because it greatly reduced this source of mortality.
That’s super interesting!