An alternative theory (in moderate vogue circa mid-1980s, don’t know its status nowadays) goes (or went) like this:
The big human evolutionary jump was a single one that had many significant ramifications, and that jump was neoteny, the tendency of the mature creature to retain fetal or embryonic characteristics instead of finishing development as its ancestors would have. In this one jump, you get:
•_Architecture of the hip and pelvis, which would otherwise finish rotating around so as to make walking on all fours the default posture, remains in the “earlier” angle which supports walking upright;
• A similar lack of rotation of angles in the skull where it attaches to the spine, so as to facilitate a default position that faces straight ahead without neck flexion when one stands on all fours means that the skull remains in the “earlier” position where it faces straight ahead when one is standing up;
• The bones of the skull, which would otherwise fuse and finish ossifying to form a complete hard skull, do not do so, leaving the skull (at time of birth) soft and flexible. This does not cause, but does accomodate, a much larger brain case passing through a birth canal that had not grown spectacularly larger;
• The mental and development, which would otherwise be closer to a stage where the individual would fend for itself, remains significantly immature, requiring a much longer proportion of the lifespan to be spend dependent on the parent individuals. This sets the stage for much more complex learning and enculturation than would have developed if individuals were substantially self-sufficient at 3 or 4, and also makes the co-parenting relationship and the family organization more long-lived, making a better launching point for the development of complex social organizations;
• By being born “young”, the individuals have a substantially longer lifespan (measured cross-species by using parameters such as heartbeats-per-lifetime rather than years-per-lifetime) than any other creature on earth. (NOTE: for this item, competing theories include the evolutionary advantage to individuals of possessing still-living grandparents, insofar as possessing them increased the likelihood of being cared for, therefore passing along genes for longevity);
• A few unimportant aesthetic differences such as the infantile (in primate terms) shape of the jaw and brow; relative lack of body hair is also attributable to neoteny;
• Opposable thumbs, i.e., the architecture of the hand bones, which would otherwise mature to a more foot-like system of parallel digits, does not finish differentiating and rotating, and the thumb ends up stranded higher and off to an angle like a dewclaw–except of inimitable usefulness to us rather than of vestigial unimportance.
IANAPAA (I am not a physical archeological anthropologist)