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Primate Foot Use During Bipedal Walking

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The Evolution of the Primate Foot

Part of the book series: Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects ((DIPR))

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Abstract

The foot is the body’s sole point of contact with the substrate during bipedal walking, making it key to understanding the evolution of bipedality in hominins. Although many primate species are capable of some form of facultative bipedalism, humans are the only extant primates that rely on bipedal walking as their primary form of locomotion. The human foot bears many morphological features that distinguish it from the feet of other primates, but determining the adaptive roles of these features requires a comparative perspective of bipedal foot mechanics in non-human primates. This chapter reviews in vivo studies of intrinsic foot joint kinematics, kinetics, and plantar pressure distributions in humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gibbons, and cercopithecines during bipedal walking, with a special emphasis on aspects of foot function that relate to the collision and push-off phases of a step. Among the non-human primates reviewed, Pan species (chimpanzees and bonobos) possess the feet that are the best suited to efficient terrestrial bipedalism, thanks to their use of the heel in weight support following foot contact, which reduces collisional energy loss and increases effective limb length, and their relatively stiff midfoot joints during push-off. These mechanisms likely derive from adaptations for forelimb suspension and terrestrial quadrupedalism, but they may have been pre-adaptive for bipedal locomotion. The oldest known fossil hominin foot bones resemble those of Pan species in many respects, suggesting that the last common ancestor between humans and African apes had a Pan-like foot.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “External work” refers to the amount of work that must be used to move the body’s center of mass to a given distance. During terrestrial locomotion, this work is mainly supplied by the limbs and can be estimated from measurements of ground reaction force at the individual limbs. However, the actual amount of energy used by the body to perform this work, “metabolic energy,” is very difficult to measure empirically, and thus external work is often used as a proxy.

  2. 2.

    “Power” refers here to the rate of work performed by muscles acting on a segment. “Positive” work refers to work performed by a muscle while it is shortening, whereas “negative” work refers to work performed by a muscle while it is lengthening. Thus, “positive power” refers to the rate at which muscles perform work while they are shortening and is usually involved in accelerating the body forward or maintaining the body’s forward velocity.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Nicholas B. Holowka

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  1. Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Angel Zeininger

  2. Department of Biology, Chatham University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Kevin G. Hatala

  3. Department of Biology, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA

    Roshna E. Wunderlich

  4. Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Daniel Schmitt

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Holowka, N.B. (2022). Primate Foot Use During Bipedal Walking. In: Zeininger, A., Hatala, K.G., Wunderlich, R.E., Schmitt, D. (eds) The Evolution of the Primate Foot. Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06436-4_10

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