This paper shows that controlling only a small set of adequately selected tasks is sufficient to closely reproduce the human gait kinematics. To this aim, a hierarchical controller is applied to a whole-body model including 42 degrees of freedom with 3 hierarchical tasks. The analysis of the simulated gaits shows the emergence of significant human-like properties in walking. In order to validate our results, a comparison between joint rotations in the simulated motion and in human reference motions is conducted. Finally, a discussion is given to illustrate the interest of the approach in view of related works.