lk and carry items in our hands every day. These are seemingly simple activities tllatthe majority of us don’t question. But an international team of researchers including Dr.Richmond from GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences have discovered that humanwalking upright may have originated millions of years ago as art adaptation to carrying scarcehigh-quality resources.The team of researchers from the U. S. England Japan and Portugalinvestigated the behavior of modem. day chimpanzees as they competed for food resources in aneffort to understand what ecological settings would lead a large ape~one that resembles the 6million-year old ancestor we shared in common with living chimpanzees-to walk on two legs.“These chimpanzees provide a model of the ecological conditions under which our earliestancestors might have begun walking on two legs ”said Dr. Richmond.The research findings suggest that chimpanzees switch to moving on two limbs instead of four insituations where they need to monopolize a resource. Standing on two legs allows them to calTymuch more at one time because it flees up their hands.Over time intense bursts of bipedalactivity4 may have led to anatomical changes that in turn became the subject of natural selectionwhere competition for food or other resources was strong.Two studies were conducted by the team in Guinea.The first study was conducted by the team inKyoto University’s “Outdoor laboratory”in a natural clearing in Bossouo Forest. Researchersallowed the wild chimpanzees
access to different combinations of two different types of nut-theoil palm Nut which is naturally widely available and the coula nut which is not thechimpanzees’ behavior was monitored in three situations:awhen only oil palm nuts wereavailable bwhen a small number of coula nuts were available. andcwhen coula nuts were themajority available resource.When the rare coula nuts were available only in small numbers. the chimpanzees transported moreat one time. Similarly when coula nuts were the majority resource the chimpanzees ignored theoil palm nuts altogether.The chimpanzees regarded the coula nuts as a more highly-prizedresource and competed for them more intensely.In such high-competition settings the frequency of cases in which the chimpanzees startedmovingon two legs increased by a factor of four. Not only was it obvious that bipedal movement allowedthem to carry more of this precious resource but also that they were actively trying to move ” asmuch as they could in one go by using everything available—even their mouths.The second study by Kimberley Hockings of Oxford Brookes University was a l4-month studyof Bossou chimpanzees crop-raiding a situation in which they have to compete for rare andunpredictable resources. Here 35 percent of the chimpanzees’activity inv.