News

A new study shows how natural selection for locomotion reshaped both extremities.

Congratulations to Shanen Ganapathee (G4) for receiving the Merit/Graduate Society Term-Time Research Fellowship for the 2026-2027 academic year!

Why other apes can't walk a mile in our shoes on Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald.

Why are we the only primates that walk upright? This question has fascinated scientists for decades. While our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins ​​evolved on all fours or swung from tree to tree, we developed this extraordinary ability to stand upright and...

For centuries, the question of how humans became upright walkers has fascinated scientists and philosophers. Charles Darwin famously argued in The Descent of Man (1871) that humans evolved from apes, and one of the most striking transformations along the...

Bipedal locomotion — walking upright on two legs — is a fundamental trait underpinning humankind’s success. Scientists now have identified two innovations that occurred long ago in the human evolutionary lineage that reshaped the pelvis and helped...

Now scientists are uncovering the molecular steps behind this transformation. A new study in Nature suggests that early ancestors became bipeds when old genes took on new roles. Some genes became active in unexpected parts of the embryo, while others...

Harvard scientists have discovered new evolutionary changes in pelvic structure that allowed the first humans to walk upright on two legs.

How Humans Came to Walk Upright on Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea. 

Long before birth, molecular signals orchestrate the asymmetrical development of the human pelvis. This unique process, absent in other primates, reveals how evolution programmed the conditions for our upright posture from the embryonic stage.

The complex architecture of the human pelvis stands as a remarkable testament to evolutionary ingenuity. Unlike any other primate, our pelvis serves as the foundational keystone that supports our extraordinary ability to walk upright, a mode of locomotion...

The scientific journal Nature and researchers Terence Capellini and Gayani Serevitathne were responsible for discovering the processes of change in the bone structure of the pelvis.