Why does he walk upright?
So he can carry things.
Which is the same reason why many scientists think our ancestors evolved bipedalism.
Bipedalism frees up the ape’s hands and allow the ape the ability to craft tools.
Our ancestors would have had to have had a major selection pressure for tool use and for the ability to carry things long distance for this form of locomotion to have evolved in our species. It is a very inefficient way of moving. We can’t run all that fast, and as we age, we have joint and muscle issues. We are not a very “well-designed” animal at all.
But if we weren’t upright walkers, we couldn’t carry things very well.
***
By the way, Ambam is not the first captive ape to adopt bipedalism. A chimp named Oliver became famous for his upright walking, and it was claimed that he was a humanzee, a hybrid between a human and chimp. When his DNA results came back, he was found to be fully chimp.
Humans and chimps probably can produce hybrid offspring, but to create such an animal would have major ethical ramifications.
The Soviet Union under Stalin funded a program to produce human/ape hybrids. In the West, this often gets reported that Stalin wanted to create a force of super-human soldiers to unleash upon the world. They could really “spread the revolution” with an army of genetically engineered soldiers– so the story goes.
In reality, Stalin didn’t much care for the experiments, which were actually designed to prove Darwin’s theory of evolution to the still quite religious peoples of the Soviet Union. Of course, Stalin eventually backed Lysenkoism, a type of Lamarckian theory of inheritance, and without Mendelian genetics, Darwin was negated. Followers of Mendelian genetics lost their jobs, and some were imprisoned and even killed for refusing to accept Lysenkoism. (Among these Mendelians who lost their prominent positions was Dmitri Belyaev. You know, the fox farm guy.)
But that story isn’t nearly as cool as the legend that Stalin had plan to bring about the real planet of the apes.
