ability to throw objects made us human
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throwing objects at high speed and accuracy emerged about two million years
to facilitate our ancestors hunting and was a crucial step in the evolutionary process of man , according to research just released Nature . In fact, humans are unique in their ability to release when compared with other primates. “While chimpanzees are incredibly strong and athletic, adult males of this species can only make pitches to 32 miles per hour, equivalent to a third of the speed printing at a ball a boy of 12 years playing baseball” , explains Neil Roach, a researcher at George Washington University (USA) and co-author.Using a video camera in three dimensions, Roach and his colleagues filmed several movies baseball players in action and found that the human shoulder functions as a kind of slingshot, which stores and releases large amounts of energy . “At the moment when humans make a pitch, rotate the arm back, stretching tendons and ligaments that cross the shoulder and storing elastic energy,” explains the researcher. When, then, we release this energy, “the arm accelerates forward, generating faster movement that is capable of producing the human body,” he adds. This is possible thanks to a number of anatomical changes (reduction and enlargement of the shoulders, expanding waistline and torsion of the humerus) that allowed early humans to hunt more efficiently, ie, throwing projectiles , which helped our ancestors to include meat in their diet and paved the way for a series of subsequent adaptations, such as increased brain size and migration in Africa.
“If we were not good at throwing and running and a few other things, our brains would not have evolved into larger sizes or would have developed cognitive skills such as language.’s say, if it were not for our ability to launch would not be who we are today, “says Daniel Lieberman, a researcher at Harvard University and co-author of the study.
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