Scoliosis facilitates terrestrial feeding from grasses, trees, and bushes. Given the many benefits of bipedality which depends on a particularly formed spine, it is likely that selection for bipedalism played a large role in the development of the spine as we see it today, in spite of the potential for "scoliotic deviations". According to the fossil record, scoliosis may have been more prevalent among earlier hominids such as Australopithecus and Homo erectus, when bipedality was first emerging. Their fossils indicate that there may have been selection over time for a slight reduction in lumbar length to what we see today, favoring
Sociology of the body such as anorexia and bulimia, and on the other end, there is a growing epidemic of obesity, especially in the US. Both ideals have increased widely over the last few decades due in part to growing mass media coverage in which there are norms within society and the always growing pressure to either look and feel a certain way. Sociology of the body Sociology of the body is a branch of sociology studying the representations and social uses of the human body in modern societies. According to Thomas Laqueur, prior to the eighteenth century the predominant model for a social