Mechanics & Origins of Bipedalism

This course will take you through the kinematics of human locomotion including modeling upright walking as a controlled fall, how muscles and bones work together to move individuals using a series of joints and levers, and how the abductor mechanism works to solve the “seesaw problem” of side-to-side wobbling. You will also understand how paleoanthropologists look for musculoskeletal adaptations in fossils to reconstruct how something in the past moved. You’ll explore how musculoskeletal adaptations correlate with bipedalism, as well as what significance these clues hold for telling us about how hominins moved. Additionally, you will learn the kinematics of other habitual striding bipeds found in the animal kingdom. Every module of this course has been created with the intention of a “hands-on” learner experience, where you can play around with and learn from 3D renditions of different human and animal fossils. Through these exercises, you will be able to observe and describe animal behavior in order to explain the function of their locomotion and how that relates to our own.

• Module 1: An Overview of Bipedalism and Musculoskeletal Adaptations
• This module provides an introduction to the kinematics of human locomotion and the musculoskeletal adaptations for bipedalism.
• Module 2: More About the Mechanics of Bipedalism
• This module explores how other bipedal walkers move uniquely.
• Module 3: The Origins of Bipedalism and its Evolution
• This module provides an overview of human evolution and explores the origin of bipedalism.