Actually I don’t any more. I’m walking rather bent over from arthritis and spine problems, but that’s not what I want to talk about. Charles Darwin noticed in “The Descent of Man” that apes and gorillas and chimps did not walk upright. To quote Darwin, “Man alone has become a biped.” He said bipedalism was one of mankind’s “most conspicuous characters.”
The secret is in the largest bone in your pelvis. It is called the ilium. It evolved to its present shape as our brains got larger, and the birth passage had to accommodate those larger heads. Dr. Terence Capellini, a developmental geneticist at Harvard and a colleague, Gayani Senevirathne, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, have been studying chimp and ape skeletons and embryos preserved in a number of museums.
They hope to discover how the changes in the pelvis may have made us vulnerable to certain pelvic disorders.
In May the Trump administration terminated billions of dollars of funding to Harvard, including the grant that supported the pelvis research. Dr. Capellini and his researchers were two years into a five year project.
Dr. Capallini said, “We are wondering what would have come next had we not lost this funding.”
Information for this post, including the quotations, is from Carl Zimmer, “The Evolutionary Steps to Standing Upright,” New York Times, (Sept. 9, 2025), p.D4.
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