Pre-historic man?

Question

Why is bipedalism such an important characteristic in early man?

Answer 1

you meant to say pre-flood man,..

o how the public school system and higher education camps are so twofaced, biased, unbalanced, misguided, humanistic, oxymoronic,......

$250,000.00 wager is still up for grabs for empirical scientific evidence for evolution by hovind,..

the history and discovery channels need to go back and do more critical thinking research projects b4 they air their propaganda for evolution,..

i e a e,..

unificationist,..

Answer 2

It made early man do much more stuff. It was important because the apes that became the first hominids needed to learn how to walk on two legs.

Answer 3

Bipedalism was not shortly followed by tools use. While there are many hypotheses as to why bipedalism evolved, one particularly good one states that bipedalism helped hominins to better exploit the patchy food resources that came into being around 7mya. In this case bipedalism is more energy efficient than knuckle walking or terrestrial quadrupedalism.

Answer 4

It allowed him to use his hands

Answer 5

It shows progression and the "survival of the fittest" in a way.  We walk upright, so we can run from predators faster, develop our hands as more accurate tool-users, etc.

Answer 6

Picture this:

It's 2.6 million years ago. You don't have a very large brain in cc capacity. You want to migrate north from Africa and you're walking on all fours. You can't see very far because the Fauna is over your head in height.

You rise up on your two back legs and due to the evolution of your pelvis, this posture does not cause the pain it normally would. You find that you can see far better and much farther, identify predators and recognize food stuffs.

You can also, now that you are walking on two legs move with much less effort so that you can go farther.

Now, you may make it all the way out of Africa, past what we moderns call the Middle East or to India and then on to China.

New experiences, new things for the brain to deal with; of course, this doesn't happen over night.

But as you move north, your offspring are forced to learn new information and over lots of time (remember they didn't have jet aircraft) your offspring and their offspring experience unusual goings on, on the 2 million year trip, in what is to eventually become the frontal cortex of your cerebral hemisphere.

The rest, as they used to say back in the Olduvai Gorge, 2.6 million years ago, is history.

Answer 7

"Man could not have attained his present dominant position in the world without the use of his hands, which are so admirably adapted to the act of obedience of his will" -Darwin

Our ancestors came down out of the trees when Africa became deforested and no longer needed the front limbs for climbing branches but of course still used them to navigate the ground.  Over time they may have begun to carry food or use them for a variety of other reasons and eventually developed into bipedal beings that had free tool making digits, literally at hand.