Spondylolysis and Spinal Adaptations for Bipedalism: The Overshoot Hypothesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and objectives\nThe study reported here focused on the aetiology of spondylolysis, a vertebral pathology usually caused by a fatigue fracture. The goal was to test the Overshoot Hypothesis, which proposes that people develop spondylolysis because their vertebral shape is at the highly derived end of the range of variation within Homo sapiens.\nMethodology\nWe recorded 3D data on the final lumbar vertebrae of H. sapiens and three great ape species, and performed three analyses. First, we compared H. sapiens vertebrae with and without spondylolysis. Second, we compared H. sapiens vertebrae with and without spondylolysis to great ape vertebrae. Lastly, we compared H. sapiens vertebrae with and without spondylolysis to great ape vertebrae and to vertebrae of H. sapiens with Schmorl’s nodes, which previous studies have shown tend to be located at the ancestral end of the range of H. sapiens shape variation.\nResults\nWe found that H. sapiens vertebrae with spondylolysis are significantly different in shape from healthy H. sapiens vertebrae. We also found that H. sapiens vertebrae with spondylolysis are more distant from great ape vertebrae than are healthy H. sapiens vertebrae. Lastly, we found that H. sapiens vertebrae with spondylolysis are at the opposite end of the range of shape variation than vertebrae with Schmorl’s nodes.\nConclusions\nOur findings indicate that H. sapiens vertebrae with spondylolysis tend to exhibit highly derived traits and therefore support the Overshoot Hypothesis. Spondylolysis, it appears, is linked to our lineage’s evolutionary history, especially its shift from quadrupedalism to bipedalism.\nLay summary: Spondylolysis is a relatively common vertebral pathology usually caused by a fatigue fracture. There is reason to think that it might be connected with our lineage’s evolutionary shift from walking on all fours to walking on two legs. We tested this idea by comparing human vertebrae with and without spondylolysis to the vertebrae of great apes. Our results support the hypothesis. They suggest that people who experience spondylolysis have vertebrae with what are effectively exaggerated adaptations for bipedalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".