Modern humans evolved not to swing our hips as much as chimpanzees

By Michael Marshall

Humans have lost their swing. Chimpanzees and other great apes swing their hips when they walk, but modern humans do not. This means our strides are shorter than those of chimpanzees, even though our legs are proportionally longer.

“We’ve always had this idea that evolution has been acting on fossil humans to make strides longer and longer,” says Nathan Thompson at the New York Institute of Technology in the US. But in fact, he says, “humans right …