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As seenin this TV , a silverback gorilla named Ambam at the Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in the U.K. like walk upright . Zookeepers say he does it to see over his confine ’s walls , and to carry big amounts of food . Life ’s Little Mysteries require Kevin Hunt , anthropologist at Indiana University and director of the Human Origins andPrimate EvolutionLab , if Ambam ’s bipedal demeanour is surprising .
" It ’s not strange for chimp and gorillas to fend up , but they do n’t usually take the air very far , " he told us . " If this gorilla was a darling when he was untried , he may have learned to walk upright to sort of copy the homo around him . "
Apparently , Ambam ’s father walk on two leg a stack , too . Hunt says Ambam ’s beginner could have commence life as a pet and learned to be bipedal , then Ambam could have learned the behavior from him . " Or it could be a weird personality quirk that he inherit genetically , " Hunt adds .
Ambam ’s behavior — and ape bipedalism in general — may shed light on the evolution of bipedalism in human race ' ancestors . " There ’s a raft of argument about why we evolved to be bipedal , but I advocate a theory that it ’s related to food - gathering rather than looking over thing , " Hunt says .
" Chimps are fruit eaters . You could envisage chimps millions of years ago that were around little trees where they could pass fruits by standing on the ground and get through up , " Hunt says . " I observed chimpanzee doing this in Gambia . "
" But there ’s also a hypothesis that we first stood up to see over thing like magniloquent dope . " This follows from the surmise that hominins first evolved in a grassy woodland region in East Africa .
Ambam ’s zookeepers say he stands up in ordering to carry food in his arm as well as to take care over walls , so perhaps he provide evidence in favor of both hypothesis about the evolution of bipedalism .
This article was provided byLife ’s Little Mysteries , a sis site to LiveScience .
