Skeleton transform of which the medial axis transform is the most popular has been proposed as a useful shape abstraction tool for the representation and modeling of human posture. This paper explains this proposition with a description of the areas in which skeletons could serve to enable the representation of shapes. We present algorithms for two-dimensional posture modeling using the developed simplified shock graph (SSG). The efficacy of SSG extracted feature vectors as shape descriptors are also evaluated using three different classifiers, namely, decision tree, multilayer perceptron, and support vector machine. The paper concludes with a discussion of the issues involved in using shock graphs to model and classify human postures.