LiveScience is a really neat web site and I get the opportunity to look around it every now and then.

The recent long weekend to celebrate Discovery or Columbus Day presented just the right moment and as usual they did not disappoint.

Charles Q. Choi writes in a piece entitled Human Ancestors Walked Upright, Study Claims:

The ancestors of humanity are often depicted as knuckle-draggers, making humans seem unusual in our family tree as “upright apes.”

Controversial research now suggests the ancestors of humans and the other great apes might have actually walked upright too, making knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas the exceptions and not the rule.

In other words, “the other great apes we see now, such as chimps or gorillas or orangutans, might have descended from human-like ancestors,” researcher Aaron Filler, a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist and medical director at Cedars-Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders in Los Angeles, told LiveScience.

Filler analyzed how the spine was assembled in more than 250 living and extinct mammalian species, with some bones dating up to 220 million years old.

He discovered a series of changes that suggest walking upright-and not with our knuckles-might actually have been the norm for the ancestors of today’s great apes.

To read the entire article click here…

Enjoy.