Walk Like a Man

Study: Competition for food may have led ancestors to walk on two feet.

Walking upright is one of the key traits separating mankind from other primates, but the question remains: Why did this become the movement of choice for humans? New research on man’s closest living relative suggests the reason may have been to better compete—in this case, to cart-off more food when it may be in short supply.

In the study appearing last month in the journal Current Biology, an international team of scientists, including GW anthropology professor Brian Richmond, observed two groups of wild chimpanzees in western Africa’s Bossou Forest.

In one group of 11 chimps, researchers found that when a new, uncommon type of nut was added to the food supply, chimps were four times as likely to carry them off on two feet, and that the use of both hands enabled them to carry more than twice as much bounty.

(Photo by Flickr user The Dilly Lama.)

The idea, according to the study, is that the new type of nut represented for the chimpanzees “a rare resource of unpredictable availability.” In other words, the chimps wanted to get while the getting was good.

The scientists also observed crop-raiding behavior by a dozen other Bossou chimpanzees over the course of 14 months, another situation in which there is competition for limited resources. They found that 35 percent of the time the chimps carried away food on two feet.

The chimpanzees’ bipedal grab-and-go, according to the researchers, may be an effort to secure a greater share of a limited food supply and to take it elsewhere, reducing competition.

The spoils of gathering food this way, they suggest, may have created the need for anatomical features that allowed for more efficient upright walking, and marked the divergence that led to the first humans.

“These chimpanzees provide a model of the ecological conditions under which our earliest ancestors might have begun walking on two legs,” said Dr. Richmond, chair of the Anthropology Department in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, and among the researchers expected to move into the new Science and Engineering Hall. “Something as simple as carrying—an activity we engage in every day—may have, under the right conditions, led to upright walking and set our ancestors on a path apart from other apes that ultimately led to the origin of our kind.”

Teams Vie in $50K GW Business Plan Competition

Search engine for “deep web” analytics wins $25,000 top prize.

If the vast amount of information available on the Internet is envisioned as an iceberg, traditional search engines like Google only uncover the very tip.

That’s why Zhuojie Zhou and Nan Zhang developed WiseAgg, a search engine for analysts. The engine, which works on a regular computer, uncovers analytics far beyond what a normal search engine can find, giving the user valuable “deep web” data. The idea was so innovative that judges at GW’s annual Business Plan Competition this month awarded it the top prize of $25,000 in cash and in-kind investments.

Mr. Zhou, a Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Dr. Zhang, a GW assistant professor of computer science, also won the Plug and Play Tech Award, which will cover travel expenses and tuition for the team to attend a “start-up accelerator” seminar in Silicon Valley to help them refine their business idea.

The winners beat out seven other teams that made it to the finals. In earlier rounds, the field was narrowed from 144 applicants representing all of GW’s schools—the competition’s largest ever number of participants—to 32 semifinalists, who were invited to develop full business plans. There also were educational workshops, feedback and pitch sessions, and a mentoring process to help teams develop their ideas.

The $10,000 second prize went to AthleteTrax, a web-based client management platform for college athletic administrations and student-athletes to increase organization and productivity. The AthleteTrax founders—Jon Halpern, Reinaldo Coriano, Elizabeth Zander and Brian Gross, all GW sophomores—also won the best undergraduate team award of $10,000 and the Audience Choice Award of $1,000, making the team’s total winnings $21,000.

Pilot testing of AthleteTrax using several GW athletic teams will begin next fall, with a test including all varsity teams slated for the spring.

The third prize of $4,000 went to Fundzy, conceived by junior Dylan Fox. Fundzy is an online fundraising platform that allows small organizations without official nonprofit status—such as sports teams and volunteer groups—to raise money while giving incentives to their donors. A $1,000 fourth prize went to Imagnus Biomedical, started by seniors Nathaniel Diskint and Caitlin Keating to market their cost-efficient flow-regulator device for use in medical settings.

The event is funded by entrepreneurs Florida Gov. Richard Scott and his wife, Annette, whose daughter Allison Guimard, BBA ’05, is also an entrepreneur. Additional sponsors this year included Capital One Bank, Tech Cocktail, Blank Rome LLP, iStrategy Labs, Plug and Play Tech Center and Brazen Careerist.

(For more on the winners and the Business Plan Competition, read the full article in GW Today.)

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