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Hi and welcome to my Humanities blog. Here is where I will be putting all of my humanities work throughout the 2011-2012 school year at ISB (the International School of Belgrade). I hope you will enjoy and please follow!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

On Our Own Two Feet by Stephen Whitt

Many famous anthropologists debate about the reason we walk on our two feet. Some of them believe it was the climate change and the switch between tropical and dry and others believe it was for reproduction or getting a mate. But they all do agree that we did become bipedal roughly seven million years ago. Although humans are quite similar to apes there are some quite significant differences for example, an apes snout protrudes from it's face and it has relatively no forehead. It has a very large brow and a much smaller brain case even though it's brain is still very big for it's size. Whereas humans have large foreheads with virtually no protruding brow. In Homo Sapiens, because we stand up straight whilst walking, the hole where our spinal cord enters the skull ( the Foranum Magnum) is at the bottom. Whereas for our ape-like ancestors, the oldest of them walked on all fours. Because of that their walking habits their Foranum Magnum is more to the back of the skull, to make it easier for them to see whilst walking on all fours.

MLA Citation: Whitt, Stephen. "On Our Own Two Feet." Odyssey: Adventures in Science Oct. 2009: 26-28. Print.

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