No? Does such a perfect pop culture anthropology theory even have a right not to be true? Let alone be called by a rival anthropologist “bizarre” and “weird,” as in the article at The Scientist? The skinny:
In May, Melott and Brian Thomas of Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, published a paper detailing the proposed connections between these stellar explosions, which started roughly 7 million years ago in a nearby part of the Milky Way, and the bipedalism transition (J Geol, 127:475–81, 2019). The authors’ argument ties in with an existing idea, known as the savannah theory, that a change from forest to grassland could have spurred our hominin ancestors in Africa to stand up to see what tree to walk to next and to check for predators that might be lurking among the grasses. By providing data on what caused our ancestors’ landscape to change, the team’s study helps flesh out this particular hypothesis, Melott says.
The study is just the latest of many to tackle the origins of bipedalism—but it hasn’t particularly convinced anthropologists. “It is an interesting hypothesis,” Bernhard Zipfel, an expert on human evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, writes in an email to The Scientist. But gathering convincing evidence to support any bipedalism hypothesis is extremely difficult, he notes
.Ashley Yeager, “Exploding Stars Probably Didn’t Spur Hominins to Walk Upright” at The Scientist
He’s not kidding. Here’s a bit of the current bipedal bumph:
Paleontologist: Humans walked on two legs from the beginning Carol Ward: It seems to be a behavior that was present in some of the earliest members of our branch of the family tree. It represented what was really the initial major adaptive change from any apelike creature that came before us.
Researchers: Supernova prompted humans to walk upright Funny, if bipedalism originated in a global catastrophe, that it never occurred to any other primate to resolve the problem by becoming fully bipedal. But keep thinking. Resist groupthink.
Bipedalsm: Regulatory area cent.com/intelligent-design/bipedalism-regulatory-area-missing-in-humans/” target=”another”>missing in humans
Researcher: To Understand Human Bipedalism, Stop Assuming “A Chimpanzee Starting Point”
Rough terrain caused humans to start walking upright
Early bipedalism walked no straight line
We’ve also heard that bipedalism developed so we could hit each other. Or carry infants. Or scarce resources. Or save energy. Or cool down. But mainly so we could have our hands free for whatever. (Saving eneregy and cooling down don’t really count here because lots of other methods would have worked; they just wouldn’t have freed the hands at the same time.)
See also “I’m Walkin’, Yes Indeed I’m Walkin’” But Not Because It’s Necessarily a Better Way to Get Around
Also, Design perspectives and the physiology of walking
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