Human Ancestors Had Flexible Feet

Okay, perhaps those percentages aren’t quite balanced properly; nonetheless, the connection between our ancestors’ feet and gibbon feet isn’t found in the fossil record.

They then begin their next step by lifting the heels first, then push their feet off the ground using their toes.

Rather, it’s the idea of the University of Liverpool’s Evie Vereecke, who believes our supposed “ape-like ancestors might have walked like today’s gibbons,” reports LiveScience.

The origin of Vereecke’s idea is actually a striking admission on the part of evolutionists: how could our “mostly tree-climbing ancestors” walk upright, given they lacked “specialized walking feet”? Vereecke, noting that gibbons walk upright more than a tenth of the time, video-recorded gibbons walking at a zoo in Belgium. She developed a computer model using the recordings and determined that—like ballerinas, LiveScience notes—gibbons land on their toes before their heels hit the ground. They then begin their next step by lifting the heels first, then push their feet off the ground using their toes.

According to LiveScience, the motion is actually quite the opposite of the way humans walk:

Unlike gibbons’ flat feet, we have arched feet with an elastic band along the sole. . . . In essence, our feet go from an arched or upside-down “U” shape to flat when walking, while gibbons’ feet change from flat to “U” shaped.

In her research, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Vereecke concluded that “even if you have these flat, flexible feet, you can walk upright quite efficiently . . . it doesn’t restrict or limit your abilities even though you don’t have this specialized foot structure as modern humans.”

The question is, how does this connect human ancestors to “walking” apes? The research actually is strong evidence for the opposite: apes, when walking upright for short periods of time, do it quite differently than humans!

But Vereecke, referencing Lucy, stated, “We have some fossil remains of hominin feet, and those indicate that our early ancestors had floppy, flexible feet.” Or could it be that those “flexibly footed” fossils aren’t human ancestors at all?

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