This new paper in Nature hits a lot of sweet spots for me: nicely written, riveting topic, some very interesting papers cited that I hadn’t read, a great piece by Carl Zimmer (link below), and maybe most importantly, a magnificent pun-adjacent title.
Paper is open access. Here is the first paragraph of the main section of the paper (the de facto Introduction); I’ve removed the citations but half of them were new to me and super interesting:
Since the work of Darwin, we have known that upright bipedal locomotion set the human lineage on a separate evolutionary path from the other apes, but the developmental bases for this giant step have been a matter of speculation. It has long been appreciated that evolution occurs by modifying developmental processes, but with a few exceptions, it has been difficult to pinpoint such modifications for most major evolutionary novelties, including the developmental bases for the key adaptations that underlie hominin bipedalism.
Paper:
The evolution of hominin bipedalism in two steps
Carl Zimmer’s piece in the New York Times: [gift link]