>>18312154>Then did humans become bipedal? What is the purpose?the ancestors of all the great apes were already arboreally bipedal, we've been bipedal for at least ~20 million years already
it's rather chimpanzees and gorillas that independently developed two different forms of knuckle-walking as they descended to the ground at their respective times of divergence from the common ancestors
yes, that means your popular myth of a chimpanzee slowly rising from the ground to standing up is blatant nonsense with zero basis in reality
>«By the early 2000s the fossil record of the Eurasian and East African Miocene (23–5 million years ago (Ma)) was burgeoning and revealing the body form of early ‘crown’ hominoids ('crown’ hominoids being the direct ancestors of all living apes, including humans). These included fossils of species such as Morotopithecus bishopi (from approximately 18–22 Ma), Pierolapithecus catalaunicus (c. 12 Ma), Hispanopithecus (Dryopithecus) laietanus (c. 10 Ma) and Orrorin tugenensis (6 Ma). These fossils suggested that, contrary to expectations and fossil evidence from Proconsul hesoloni and associated species, the early crown hominoids stood and moved with an orthograde (upright) posture.>[...]>The fact that orthograde (upright) body postures had been evolving and diversifying in our hominoid ancestry for in excess of 15 million years pushed study of the origins of bipedalism back from the Pliocene into the early Miocene. It also challenged the commonly held concept that the acquisition of habitual bipedalism is an appropriate marker of the separation of the hominins from the panins (bonobos and chimpanzees), a separation that is estimated to have occurred only 5–8 million years ago. It pushed the context of bipedal origins back into the forest canopy from the ground (Senut 2011) where it had spent some considerable time as a result of the knuckle-walking hypothesis. 