Ankle gait

Male western gorilla ( Gorilla gorilla ) in ankle gait

Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid: Mounted skeleton with ankle gait of the right hand in Gorilla gorilla

The ankle gait is the movement of the gorillas and chimpanzees on all four feet, with the front extremities touching the back of the middle phalanx .

The occasionally observed walking upright , in these great apes , however, a rare form of locomotion.

A comparison of the wrist bones of chimpanzees and gorillas showed that their ankle gait developed independently of each other, so that their last common ancestor did not yet exhibit this walking posture. Since gorillas and chimpanzees are not sister species , it follows that the hominini - the species of the line of development leading to humans - also do not descend from ancestors with ankle gaiters.

Web links

Wiktionary: ankle gait - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

↑ Tracy L. Kivella, Daniel Schmitt: Independent evolution of knuckle-walking in African apes shows that humans did not evolve from a knuckle-walking ancestor. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Volume 106, No. 34, 2009, pp. 14241-14246, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0901280106
eurekalert.org of August 10, 2009: "Bipedal humans came down from the trees, not up from the ground. "

[1] Tracy L. Kivella, Daniel Schmitt: Independent evolution of knuckle-walking in African apes shows that humans did not evolve from a knuckle-walking ancestor. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Volume 106, No. 34, 2009, pp. 14241-14246, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0901280106
eurekalert.org of August 10, 2009: "Bipedal humans came down from the trees, not up from the ground. "