Excitement when I read the headline: “Humanity’s upright gait may have roots in trees.” Disappointment when I read the theory:

A new analysis of apes’ wrist bones suggests that a two-legged stride evolved from tree climbing, not ground-based knuckle-walking…

“Our data show that there is no unequivocal evidence for a terrestrial, knuckle-walking phase in human evolution and provide strong support for a human evolutionary history in the trees,” says [Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthopology in Leipzig, Germany…]

Kivell and Schmitt [f Duke University in Durham, N.C.] convincingly show that the anatomy of knuckle-walking differs in chimps and gorillas, remarks anthropologist Susannah Thorpe of the University of Birmingham, England. Hominids retained the anatomical basis of an upright stance from a tree-dwelling great ape ancestor, Thorpe proposes.

I was rather hoping that the theory would not point to something as practical as tree-dwelling but to something as magical as imitation. I very much liked the idea of a distant, knuckle-walking ancestor coming across a beautiful tree, like the one in Magnolia Park, and being inspired to stand on two feet so that it too could be as beautiful, as upright, as slender as the tree.

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To be on all fours is to be like a bush; to be on your feet is to be like a tree. This was the theory I so badly wanted read and think about all day.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

17 replies on “The Human Tree”

  1. Silly Charles, we walk on two feet because that’s the way we were designed 6,000 years ago to ride dinosaurs in the Creator’s image.

  5. The fact that we now walk upright, and that we can possibly attribute a whole slew of characteristics including the evolution of the current human mind to something as simple as mobility through the trees is far more incredible than a conscious effort to do so.

  6. Our early ancestors were probably busy doing things to survive, leaving little time to be inspired to imitate a tree. That’s something mental masticators with access to a blog do.

  8. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before some archaeologist unearths a memo from our distant ancestors explaining how “noble” it would be to walk instead of crawl. That’s the only way I can see how one would scientifically prove that our species somehow “decided” to evolve thanks to a specific tree (or just trees in general). That said, this idea of how evolution works is not too far removed from the Intelligent Design crowd, so let me know when you guys start printing the text books.

  9. One of the funny things in genetics studies is when you find out that large numbers of undereducated people who think they’re white are genetically not …

    If you want genetic diversity, Africa is the place to be, even if it doesn’t have cool forests as much as it used to.

  11. Except Bonobos walk upright and have heads placed higher like ours. They do use trees but they also can fill their arms and walk comfortably upright.

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