Captive orangutan locomotion and its relation to the origin of human bipedalism

dc.contributor.author	Putt, Shelby S.
dc.date.accessioned	2010-10-25T15:23:14Z
dc.date.available	2010-10-25T15:23:14Z
dc.date.issued	2009
dc.identifier.citation	Putt, Shelby S. (2009). Captive orangutan locomotion and its relation to the origin of human bipedalism. -- Lambda Alpha Journal, v.39, p.23-38	en
dc.identifier.issn	0047-3928
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10057/3263
dc.description.abstract	One of the prominent questions in paleoanthropological studies is the origin of bipedalism. There have been several hypotheses presented on the ancestral type of locomotion that predated bipedalism. These hypotheses include a terrestrial knuckle-walking quadrupedal ape, a brachiating hylobatid-like ancestor, a palmigrade terrestrial ape, and a climbing arboreal ape. Thorpe et al. present an extension to the climbing hypothesis with the data that they gathered from wild orangutans of the Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia (2006, 2007). They present the hypothesis that bipedalism originated with an arboreal ape similar to extant orangutans, and they provide that the orangutan locomotor data that they gathered supports this claim. This paper includes locomotor data that I collected from captive orangutans in the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo. The two data sets are not correlative, but my observations of assisted and unassisted bipedalism in the captive orangutans lend some support to the climbing hypothesis. When considering the functional anatomy of the wrist and ankle of extant primates and extinct hominins, the answer still remains inconclusive.	en
dc.format.extent	374823 bytes
dc.format.extent	1843 bytes
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.format.mimetype	text/plain
dc.language	en_US	en
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.publisher	Wichita State University. Department of Anthropology	en
dc.relation.ispartofseries	LAJ	en
dc.relation.ispartofseries	v.39	en
dc.subject	Orangutan	en
dc.subject	Locomotion	en
dc.subject	Brachiate	en
dc.subject	Bipedal	en
dc.subject	Climbing hypothesis	en
dc.subject	Palmigrade	en
dc.title	Captive orangutan locomotion and its relation to the origin of human bipedalism	en
dc.type	Article	en