![]() Draw the arm on the other side by using the other line as a guide. Chimps walk on their knuckles, so draw the bent finger using curved lines. Use the oval at the bottom as a guide to draw the hand. When you get the structure right, darken the lines using quick, short strokes for the hair. Lightly sketch the shape of the arm and hand as you follow the path of the line. Step 16: Use the lines on the right as guides to draw the chimpanzee's arms. Use quick, short strokes as you follow the basic path of the entire head shape for a hairy look. the fact that all of us are apes.Step 15: Draw the rest of the head using the remaining lines as guides. “But also tie us intimately to our evolutionary heritage – i.e. “They're what make us humans, are our flexible forelimbs,” he said. “So having the ability to raise your arm above your head and then fully extend your elbow – I mean, that's what Tom Brady does when he throws a touchdown pass, right?”įannin – who was speaking from Borneo, where’s doing fieldwork with orangutans – said he thinks about that often when he watches sports. “An overhead throwing motion – that is an ape hallmark,” he said. Later, humans would find new purposes for those same abilities – using tools, throwing spears and, eventually sports. Early human ancestors would still have been going up into trees for safety, before the use of fire. Those flexible, apelike shoulders and elbows would go on to help early hominins in various ways, Fannin said. If an ape’s arms get too tired on the climb down, it’s more likely to make a mistake and fall. “And so I thought, ‘Well, you know what if they're doing this for the same reason?’ ” “It helps you to not keep your quads under contraction for a ton of time, which fatigues you,” said Joy, who wrote up the results of the study for her undergraduate thesis. When she’s out running trails and has to descend a steep slope, she doesn’t clip her stride, but instead runs downhill in something more like a “controlled fall.” The idea came to her because she does a version of that herself. Using outstretched arms to drop from branch to branch – rather than descending in a more cramped position – could also allow apes to expend less energy and avoid muscle fatigue, said Mary Joy, a recent Dartmouth graduate who was one of the co-authors. That’s especially important for bigger animals like apes, who are more likely to seriously hurt themselves if they fall. Their greater range of motion helps chimpanzees execute all those moves, and get down from the trees safely, DeSilva said. “There are times when an ape will almost crash through a free fall and just grab onto branches as they're falling – sort of almost a Spider-Man kind of move.” “Other times they would go down a tree almost like a fire pole,” he said. Sometimes it was a slow, careful downclimb, going from handhold to handhold. When descending, the chimpanzees extended their elbow and shoulder joints to a much greater degree.ĭeSilva said the chimps they observed use various techniques to get down from trees. The two primates used similar movements to climb up trees. “The pull of gravity is going to want to sort of accelerate your body out of that tree, especially if you're big – and apes are big.”įor the study, the researchers compared footage of chimps and sooty mangabeys, a species of monkey. “Getting out of a tree is dangerous,” said Jeremy DeSilva, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth and another of the authors. The study, published last week in the journal Royal Society Open Science, suggests a different answer: climbing down. And that's something a lot of monkeys don't do.”įannin said scholars have debated why apes evolved to have that kind of range of motion – perhaps to help them get up trees, or gather fruit from branches. “They have the ability to fully extend their elbows. Humans and other apes “have the ability to raise their arms above their heads,” said Luke Fannin, a Dartmouth graduate student and the study’s lead author. That’s according to a new study from researchers at Dartmouth College, who set out to understand why apes – a group that includes gorillas, chimpanzees and humans – have more flexible elbows and shoulders than monkeys, our smaller primate cousins. The reason we can throw a football or reach the top shelf in our kitchen may have something to do with how our ape ancestors got down from trees.
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