Cranial–Postcranial Integration and the Reconstruction of Early Hominin Locomotion

Reconstructing the locomotor repertoire of the last common ancestor (LCA) ofAfrican apes and humans is one long-standing methodologically difficult issue ofevolutionary anthropology. The postcranial skeleton provides the basis forinferences of locomotor behavior because cranial morphology has been almostexclusively interpreted in the phylogenetic, dietary, or encephalization contexts.This type of analytical partition of the postcranial skeleton and cranial skeleton isproblematic because it often fails to consider the inherent structural and functionalintegration of the vertebrate body plan. This paper proposes a conceptualframework of the cranial anatomy as an embedded component of the locomotorsystem of the vertebrate body plan.