HUMAN ancestors living 3 or 4 million years ago may not have walked with a stooped, ape-like posture after all.
Weijie Wang and a team from the University of Liverpool in the UK asked volunteers to walk normally, fast, slowly or with a stooped posture, and analysed how much energy they used in each gait. They found that when people are walking comfortably, their body’s potential energy is easily converted to kinetic energy, and vice versa. But a stooped posture is so inefficient that they doubt it would have evolved in the first place (Journal of Human Evolution, vol 44,…
