ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a consideration of the forest biome and of how those primates most closely related to us, the African great apes, have adapted to the forest. Such tropical woodland is an important feature of both Africa and Asia, and it may have played a critical part in the early evolution of the Hominidae. A second significant point is that the skull base shows that the balance of the skull upon the vertebral column was such as we find among bipedal hominids, rather than among apes. Observations of chimpanzees, which spend some part of each day on the ground and often move bipedally, have given us some ideas of the advantages and disadvantages of bipedalism. In the Congo basin of central Africa, we find people well adapted to life in the rain forest. In Southeast Asia, we find people adapted to the rain forest who are also of small stature.
