The first human-like traits to appear in the hominin fossil record are bipedal walking and smaller, blunt canines.

In hominins, habitual bipedal posture brings the insertion ... 521-547. White, T. D. Early hominin femora: The inside story. Comptes Rendus Palevol 5, 99-108 (2006).

Now the challenge -- one of the ultimate questions in the study of human origins -- is to understand why the earliest hominids stood up. "Bipedalism is a fundamental human characteristic," said Dr.

Lucy showed that human ancestors were up and walking around long before the earliest stone tools were made or brains got bigger, and subsequent fossil finds of much earlier bipedal hominids have ...

Starting in Africa with our early hominin relatives (who are more closely related to us than to chimpanzees ... while six-million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis leg bones show that they exhibited ...

provided unprecedented insights into early hominin anatomy. A singular discovery When Lucy was discovered, she was “singular,” Sponheimer says. But subsequent research has uncovered hundreds of ...

"Australopithecus provides critical insights into the evolution of bipedal locomotion and early ... of Humankind" area known for yielding early hominin fossils. The ratio of two different forms ...