The author of a new study claims that humans learned to walk upright primarily to beat each other:
“The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that our ancestors adopted bipedal posture so that males would be better at beating and killing each other when competing for females,” says David Carrier, a biology professor who conducted the study. “Standing up on their hind legs allowed our ancestors to fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making punching much more dangerous.”
That also explains, Carrier says, why women find tall men attractive.
Carrier says many scientists are reluctant to consider an idea that paints our ancestors as violent.”Among academics there often is resistance to the reality that humans are a violent species. It’s an intrinsic desire to have us be more peaceful than we are,” he says.
In the age of Evilicious, few others have noted this trend among academics. The study demonstrates that men hit harder in an upright position.
There’s no shortage of theses as to why we walk upright: carrying infants, saving energy, and – most people’s choice: freeing up the hands for many purposes, of peace or war.
The weakness of Carrier’s thesis, not mentioned in the article, is: Primates that do not regularly walk upright kill each other quite easily anyway. The Achilles’ heel of all these theories (so to speak) is that the advantage of upright walking must first be grasped before the practice will be attempted – and persisted in. And the first walkers must have been adults, which means that they did not have the advantage that the infant has, of being rather well-padded and close to the ground. That suggests the mental ability to persist in pursuing an advantage that exists, if it does, only in the imagination.