Doctoral Dissertation Research: Climbing Performance in African Apes

Cuny Hunter College, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Compared to the living apes, humans are notably different in having relatively short arms and long legs, which is functionally related to our unique, two-legged gait (bipedalism) and life on the ground. To better understand hominin locomotor evolution, researchers want to know when and how bipedalism affected other aspects of hominin mobility. In this dissertation project, the student co-PI will compare aspects of climbing performance in humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas to see how a range of body sizes and limb proportions affects climbing ability. The research has broad implications for understanding human evolution, movement and mechanics. Understanding more about climbing performance can also address how to limit climbing injuries, assess risk, and design technology for both sport and military climbing pursuits. This project will also support graduate student training, and science outreach to groups underrepresented in STEM fields and to local communities and athletes. The objective of this study is to establish the effects of limb proportions and body size on the climbing performance of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas by assessing three aspects of climbing performance: energetic cost, fatigue, and canopy access. The co-PI will collect behavioral locomotor data in sympatric human, chimpanzee, and gorilla populations in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park, Republic of Congo, and in human rock climbers, to control for environmental variation and observe a range of size and proportion variation. Whether, and to what extent, hominins were arboreal continues to be debated, and, more specifically, the relative prominence of vertical climbing in the locomotor repertoires of various hominin taxa remains an issue. This study will result in a more comprehensive understanding of the form/function relationship for climbing, and enable the assessment of how selection for bipedal adaptations affected climbing abilities during human evolution. It may also improve assessments of the ecology of fossil taxa.