Steudel-Numbers Karen L
Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
J Hum Evol. 2003 Feb;44(2):255-62. doi: 10.1016/s0047-2484(02)00209-9.
A wide range of selective pressures have been advanced as possible causes for the adoption of bipedalism in the hominin lineage. One suggestion has been that because modern human walking is relatively efficient compared to that of a typical quadruped, the ancestral quadruped may have reaped an energetic advantage when it walked on two legs. While it has become clear that human walking is relatively efficient and human running inefficient compared to "generalized endotherms", workers differ in their opinion of how the cost of human bipedal locomotion compares to that of a generalized primate walking quadrupedally. One view is that human walking is particularly efficient in comparison to other primates. The present study addresses this by comparing the cost of human walking and running to that of the eight primate species for which data are available and by comparing cost in primates to that of a "generalized endotherm". There is no evidence that primate locomotion is more costly than that of a generalized endotherm, although more data on adult Old World monkeys and apes would be useful. Further, human locomotion does not appear to be particularly efficient relative to that of other primates.
众多选择性压力被认为可能是人类谱系中两足行走出现的原因。一种观点认为，由于现代人类行走相较于典型四足动物的行走效率相对较高，远古四足动物用双腿行走时可能获得了能量优势。虽然已经明确，与“一般恒温动物”相比，人类行走效率相对较高而跑步效率较低，但研究人员对于人类两足行走的成本与一般灵长类动物四足行走的成本相比情况看法不一。一种观点是，与其他灵长类动物相比，人类行走效率特别高。本研究通过比较人类行走和跑步的成本与有数据可查的八种灵长类动物的成本，并将灵长类动物的成本与“一般恒温动物”的成本进行比较来探讨这一问题。没有证据表明灵长类动物的运动成本比一般恒温动物更高，不过更多关于成年旧世界猴和猿的数据会很有用。此外，相对于其他灵长类动物而言，人类的运动似乎也并非特别高效。
