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Human Quadrupeds

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The time-warp family who walk on all fours

by BEN FARMER, Daily Mail 08:31am 7th March 2006

Throwback: the family have astounded anthropologists
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An extraordinary family who walk on all fours are being hailed as the breakthrough discovery which could shed light on the moment Man first stood upright.

Scientists believe that the five brothers and sisters found in Turkey could hold unique insights into human evolution.

The Kurdish siblings, aged between 18 and 34 and from the rural south, 'bear crawl' on their feet and palms.

Study of the five has shown the astonishing behaviour is not a hoax and they are largely unable to walk otherwise.

Researchers have found a genetic condition which accounts for their extraordinary movement.

And it could provide invaluable information on how humans evolved from a four-legged hominid into a creature walking on two feet.

Two of the daughters and a son have only ever walked on two palms and two feet, but another son and daughter sometimes manage to walk upright.

The five can stand upright, but only for a short time, with both knees and head flexed.

Their remarkable story is told in a television documentary, to be screened next week, which shows scientists studying their movement, but also their struggle to fit in with modern society.

Professor Nicholas Humphrey, evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, visited the family twice. He said: "It's amazing as an example of a strange, strange aberration of human development. But their interest is how they can live in the modern world."

The five are all mentally retarded. Their mother and father, who are closely related are believed to have handed down a unique combination of genes which result in the behaviour.

Some researchers argue the genetic fault has caused the brothers and sisters to regress to a form of 'backward evolution'. Others believe it has led to brain damage which has allowed them to develop the walk.

Rather than walking on their knuckles, like gorillas or chimpanzees, they walk on the palms of their hands, with their fingers spread upwards.

Scientists believe this may be the way hominids moved to protect their fingers for more delicate movements.

Prof Humphrey said he thought the family had reverted to an instinctive form of behaviour encoded deep in the brain but abandoned during evolution.

He said: "I do not think they were destined to be quadrupeds by their genes, but their unique genetic make-up allowed them to be.

'It has produced an extraordinary window on our past. It is physically possible, which no one would have guessed from the modern human skeleton."

Study of their hands has shown they are heavily callused and have been walking like this for years.

Prof Humphrey said: "However they arrived at this point, we have adult human beings walking like ancestors several million years ago."

The five siblings spend most of their time sitting outside the family's basic rural home.

However, one brother travels to the local village where he engages in basic interactions with people.

The documentary, to be shown on BBC2 on Friday, March 17, is called The Family That Walks On All Fours.
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Source

The picture is pretty disturbing.
 
Mark Pilkington blogged this one a while back (the source links to video):

www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further/arch ... ratio.html

but this is more solid news and I'll be watching out for the BBC documentary.

The Beeb's page:

Family may provide evolution clue

Five siblings from Turkey who can only walk on all fours could provide science with an insight into human evolution, researchers have said.

The three sisters and two brothers could yield clues to why our ancestors made the transition from four-legged to two-legged animals, says a UK expert.

But Professor Nicholas Humphrey rejects the idea that there is a "gene" for bipedalism, or upright walking.

A BBC documentary about the family will be shown on Friday 17 March.

Professor Humphrey, from the London School of Economics (LSE), says that our own species' transition to walking on two feet must have been a more complex process that involved many changes to the skeleton and to the human genetic make-up.

However, a German group says a genetic abnormality does seem to be involved in the siblings' gait.

Coordination problem

Two of the sisters and one brother have only ever walked on two hands and two feet, but another sister and brother can occasionally walk on two feet for a short time.

In this position, both their knees and their head are flexed.

The five siblings live with their parents and 13 other brothers and sisters and were born with what looks like a form of brain damage.

MRI scans seem to show that they have a form of cerebellar ataxia, which affects balance and coordination.

However, scientists are divided on what caused them to revert to quadrupedalism (walking on all fours).

The method of locomotion used by the Turkish children and by our closest relatives chimpanzees and gorillas, differs in a crucial way, said Professor Humphrey.

While gorillas and chimpanzees walk on their knuckles, the Turkish siblings put their weight on the wrists, lifting their fingers off the ground.

Tool use

"What's significant about that is that chimpanzees ruin their fingers walking like that," Professor Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist, told the BBC News website.

"These kids have kept their fingers very agile, for example, the girls in the family can do crochet and embroidery."

He added that calluses pictured on the hands of one family member demonstrated that the behaviour was not a hoax.

Professor Humphrey said this could be the way that humankind's direct ancestors walked.

Hands which have kept the fingers dextrous would also have been able to manipulate tools, a key development which influenced the evolution of the human body and intelligence.

"I think it's possible that what we are seeing in this family is something that does correspond to a time when we didn't walk like chimpanzees but was an important step between coming down from the trees and becoming fully bipedal," the LSE researcher said.

'Infant walking'

Professor Humphrey thinks that the brain abnormality simply caused the siblings to rediscover a form of locomotion used by our ancestors.

"Because of the peculiar circumstances they were in, they kept walking as infants," he said.

But a team led by Stefan Mundlos of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, thinks that the genetic abnormality which causes the children's unusual gait may have played a more fundamental role in evolution.

Professor Mundlos has located the gene on chromosome 17 and speculates that a gene important in the transition to bipedalism may have been knocked out in the children.

Series producer Jemima Harrison said the programme's producers were moved by the family's "tremendous warmth and humanity".

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BBC Two's The Family That Walks On All Fours is broadcast on Friday 17 March at 2100 GMT

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Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/s ... 782492.stm

Published: 2006/03/07 17:36:15 GMT

© BBC MMVI
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Frankly i think this "clue to evolution" claim is a lot of bull, and arguably very offensive both to this family and to disabled people in general.

They have cerebellar ataxia - a fairly well known disability. In Britain, or probably even in a city or large town in Turkey, if unable to walk they would have been provided with wheelchairs. While their condition probably is genetic, it's a generalised nervous system and balance problem, and nothing at all to do with any sort of "evolutionary regression" (which isn't even accepted science anyway) or "missing link".

The way they "walk" on all fours has no resemblance to any stage humans are thought to have passed through on the way from "quadrupedal" (long-armed and knuckle-walking) apes to upright bipeds - IIRC, our posture became gradually more upright as our legs got longer and arms got shorter (or vice versa) and the only intermediate would be part-time knuckle-walking and part-time upright-walking (unless palaeontologists have come up with anything else since i read about Australopithecus and the like)...

I detect some nasty attitudes towards both disability and ethnicity/"race" in this reporting... :(
 
Sometimes when I dream I find the only way I can move (in the dream) is to drop to all fours and run like a quadruped. I wonder if this is some sort of instinctive mechanism that harks back to our ancestry- a bit like the falling sensation that jolts you awake when you're falling asleep.
 
It seems a load of nonsense

Do I detect a perfect healthy (albeit oddly locomoting) turkish family laughing all the way to the bank?
 
Slightly OT, but lately I have been strugglilng to remember where I saw some footage of a woman who had, what appeared to be, her knee on backwards. She had a kind of prosthetic "foot" thing attached to her actual foot, that was flexible and allowed her to walk upright, otherwise she would have had to walk on all fours. The footage I remember was her walking along a beach with a friend.

The thing is, I remember seeing this recently, but the memory is so hazy I am starting to wonder if it was a dream, perhaps influenced by this pic.

If anyone is aware of such a person, or the programme from which it came, I would love to hear it.

Anyways, I'll let you all get back on topic.
 
It seems a load of nonsense

Do I detect a perfect healthy (albeit oddly locomoting) turkish family laughing all the way to the bank?
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Its not nonsense at all, there was an interview with one of the people who examined the family on the Pat Kenny show this morning (Pat Kenny show is kind of a currant affairs radio show on RTE radio 1). This proffesser (i'm sorry i can't remember his name) and a graduate student of his confirmed that its real. The people involved have other brain damage as well as the walking on all fours and he confirmed that they could travel muxh faster on all fours then he could on 2 legs. As a side note the turkish investigators themselves thought that the family could not talk properly because when they conversed with each other the investigators couldn't understand them and it wasn't until the proffessers graduate student started to talk to them in Kurdish that they realized the family could communicate. The turkish investigators taught they were talking nonsense.
 
nataraja said:
I detect some nasty attitudes towards both disability and ethnicity/"race" in this reporting... :(
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Sadly you may be right. I saw a headline on the front of a paper today, in which they were referred to as "monkey people".

Surprise surprise it was the Daily Mail.
 
I'm also just thinking people with balance problems. Doubt it's some kind of throwback.
 
BBC Two's The Family That Walks On All Fours is broadcast on Friday 17 March at 2100 GMT
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Well that was fascinating - both from the perspective of science at work and from the light it casts on our adaptability as a species (although disappointingly it might not show much to do with our evolution).
 
I'm so annoyed. Just got in from work. The VCR failed to record. :x
It's unlikely but anyone got a link to this programme onliine somewhere?
 
Having seen the programme, I remain unconvinced that it's some sort of genetic throwback. In fact, the first thing I thought of when I saw the footage was this image:

brownboy.jpg


This depicts a feral child, so one wonders if there's not some similar process involved in some way (i.e. that it's learned behaviour rather than anything 'in-built').
 
Rrose_Selavy said:
I'm so annoyed. Just got in from work. The VCR failed to record. :x
It's unlikely but anyone got a link to this programme onliine somewhere?
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There's a possibilty it might appear on this site: http://www.uknova.com/

Keep an eye on it.

I also thought the whole talk of evolutionary clues as complete nonsense and slightly demeaning. Here were a group of people with a medical condition which affected their mobiltiy - and to get around that problem had used hands as well as feet to move around. It's a logical thing to do. I know someone who broke their ankle and used to shuffle around on all fours when not using crutches. I also suspect siblings may have copied one another too.

I suspect their condition had a lot to do with the environment they were brought up in. A family with access to good medical care would probably have seen them using a wheel chair or even some kind of physiotherapy to help them walk better.
 
sunspot8 said:
Rrose_Selavy said:
I'm so annoyed. Just got in from work. The VCR failed to record. :x
It's unlikely but anyone got a link to this programme onliine somewhere?
Click to expand...

There's a possibilty it might appear on this site: http://www.uknova.com/

Keep an eye on it.

.
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Thanks. I'm not nornally into Bit Torrents but might try it out.


I haven't seen this prog of course but from past viewing I must say I am not keen on Prof Nicholas Humphrey ever since his tried to demonstrate that a worm doesn't have "consciousness" by sticking a safety pin through it several times- as if that was the same as not feeling pain or reacting to stressful stimulus- There were complaints on Channel Fours Right to Reply about it many years ago - there seems an arrogance about him that I dislike, very dodgy. The allegations of paying the family not to see any other researchers don't surprise me.
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Slightly OT, but lately I have been strugglilng to remember where I saw some footage of a woman who had, what appeared to be, her knee on backwards. She had a kind of prosthetic "foot" thing attached to her actual foot, that was flexible and allowed her to walk upright, otherwise she would have had to walk on all fours. The footage I remember was her walking along a beach with a friend.
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When I worked for the Tulsa Community College Library, I flipped through some very esoteric medical journals. One article described a rare condition (the name of which I can't remember), which caused one leg to fail to grow to its full length as one aged. Also, the femur and tibia did not "curl" slightly, so the result was a leg and foot that reached only to the knee of the other leg -- with the foot pointed backwards! Apparently the prosthetic solution is to use the heel as a knee, with a false leg below that! :shock: Actually, the first thing I thought of upon seeing the rather disturbing photos in this article were the legends of yeti and other hairy creatures with their feet supposedly back to front.
 
mossy_sloth said:
Slightly OT, but lately I have been strugglilng to remember where I saw some footage of a woman who had, what appeared to be, her knee on backwards. She had a kind of prosthetic "foot" thing attached to her actual foot, that was flexible and allowed her to walk upright, otherwise she would have had to walk on all fours. The footage I remember was her walking along a beach with a friend.
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Like this?:

www.teamortho.us/Images/aaos4.jpg

They are quite common amongst amputees that compete in races.
 
Where I live in the caribbean there used to be a lot of inbreeding before the island became more developed as people would only marry within their own village. There are several inherited conditions know only on this island. I was told that there used to be someone who walked on his hands in the same way as this; butt in the air and on his palms, I don't know whether he mentally retarded or not. Apparently he was killed by a car.

There is also an actor in the film Shallow Hal who has spina bifida and walks on all fours
 
spiritdoctor said:
Where I live in the caribbean there used to be a lot of inbreeding before the island became more developed as people would only marry within their own village. There are several inherited conditions know only on this island. I was told that there used to be someone who walked on his hands in the same way as this; butt in the air and on his palms, I don't know whether he mentally retarded or not. Apparently he was killed by a car.
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If you can find out more information about that it would be very interesting.

I expect the publicity behind this case will reveal a number of other similar cases.
 
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