Contrary to what most people think , it was not our big brains that first set us apart from our apelike ancestors, but rather it was our distinctive upright posture and locomotion. Fossils like the famous “Lucy” skeleton ( Australopithecus afarensis ) have shown us that walking on two legs (bipedal locomotion) predated increase in brain size or tool making. Being able to reconstruct the behavior of extinct species like this depends on understanding the relationship between form and function – how the featur
The Stony Brook Primate Locomotion Laboratory is a facility devoted to this functional analysis of morphology with a specific emphasis on locomotor evolution. The purpose of the lab is to test the predictions of hypothesized form/function relationships using extant primate research subjects as living analogs for morphological complexes observed in fossil specimens. The lab is equipped with state-of-the-art recording equipment needed to document patterns of muscle use, limb motions and the generation of gr
Over the years, a diversity of primate species have participated in these studies including lemurs, monkeys and apes, each offering different insights into issues related to our locomotor evolution. The housing and care for these subjects far exceed federal regulations, and though minimally to noninvasive, the research protocols all receive close scrutiny by the Stony Brook University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), and no primate subject has ever been injured through any of those prot