Walking with hominins: from the reconstruction of a plausible anatomical model to gait energetics in Neandertals. Methodological aspects
Résumé
Bipedalism as preferential locomotor mode is considered essential in the hominins’ phylogenetic history. However, simulating the locomotion of fossil species is usually a difficult challenge. On the one hand, as motion data are no accessible and soft tissues are not kept in the fossil record, functional inferences can only be based on osteological characteristics, such as body proportions, joint angles or the relative thickness of cortical bone. On the other hand, fossil osteological assemblages are most of the time very fragmentary, which complicates such inferences. Nevertheless, some fossil human taxa, such as Neandertals, appear sufficiently complete in order to undertake reliable biomechanical analyses of the musculoskeletal system. Here we report a study that aim at simulating the Neandertal gait from a specific plausible anatomical modelling and estimating the corresponding gait energy expenditure, focusing on methodological tasks.
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