The ancestors of humanity are often depicted as knuckle-draggers, making humans seem unusual in our family tree as "upright apes."
Controversial research now suggests the ancestors of humans and the other great apes might have actually walked upright too, making knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas the exceptions and not the rule.
In other words, "the other great apes we see now, such as chimps or gorillas or orangutans, might have descended from human-like ancestors," researcher Aaron Filler, a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist and medical director at Cedars-Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders in Los Angeles, told LiveScience.
That doesn't seem right to me. I was always taught that knuckle-walking among modern apes was thought to be a fairly recent form of locomotion, whereas hominid ancestors were generally tree dwellers.