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Walking ape-right

ET Bureau Jan 28, 2011, 04.18am IST

What is afoot with the primates?

The advertisement for a popular mint brand shows how an 'enlightened' ape learns how to walk upright, better his peers in the animal kingdom and eventually end up as a hominid in the driver's seat - with his asinine friend relegated to pulling the cart.

If all that is a consequence of that primate's two-legged eureka moment, the phenomenon of the achievement of the ambling silverback gorilla called Ambam should be regarded as more than just an 18-second YouTube wonder. By practising the move till he perfected it (without the benefit of a mint-inspired epiphanic flash) he demonstrated a determination that clearly portends relatively rapid further progress for his species.

Suddenly, Planet of the Apes seems less like a 1960s fantasy and more like a prophetic glimpse into the future. For years, scientists have been riven by debates on the closeness of humans and apes, and bipedalism has been held by many to be the first inkling of an evolutionary upgrade. Now, with several recent recorded instances of gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans in captivity aping the human stride instead of 'knuckle-walking' (and with little idea of what transformations are afoot in the wild), there is every reason suspect that the development gap is being closed pretty rapidly.

Of course, primates should not think that walking on two legs is necessarily a good thing, even if the only species that currently does so also happens to rule this planet. For starters, with an upright posture comes a host of orthopaedic problems as the entire bodyweight falls unergonomically on two feet instead of being evenly and horizontally distributed between pad and paw.

Besides, if all them aptly ape us, there will first have to be a battle for primacy among them before they take on the current rulers; humans are clever enough to ensure that.