These Hands Were Made For Walkin'
From Yahoo:
Human quadrupeds discovered in Turkey.
LONDON (AFP) - The discovery of a Turkish family that walks on all fours could aid research into the evolution of humans.
Researchers believe the five brothers and sisters, who can walk naturally only on all fours, may provide new information on how humans evolved from four-legged hominids to walk upright.
Nicholas Humphrey, evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, told The Times the discovery opened "an extraordinary window on our past".
"I do not think they were designed to be quadrupeds by their genes, but their unique genetic make-up allowed them to be," he said.
"It has produced an extraordinary window on our past. It is physically possible, which noone would have guessed from the [modern] human skeleton."
The siblings, the subject of a new BBC documentary to be aired on March 17, suffer from a genetic abnormality that may prevent them from walking upright.
Instead, they use their palms like heels with their fingers sticking up from the ground.
The BBC said the documentary would contribute to fierce scientific debate and raised profound questions about what it is to be human.
Humphrey, who has contributed to the documentary, believes the style of walking may be a throwback to a form of behaviour abandoned by humans more than three million years ago.
Two sisters and one son have only ever walked on two hands and two feet, while another daughter and son occasionally walk on two feet.
All five are mentally retarded and have problems with language as a result of a form of underdevelopment of the brain known as cerebellar ataxia.
However Humphrey told the Times their behaviour may be partly the result of their parents tolerating the behaviour in childhood.
They are aged between 18 and 34 and live in southern Turkey, athough the makers of the documentary have not disclosed their exact location.
"They walk like animals and that's very disturbing at first. But we were also very moved by this family's tremendous warmth and humanity," Jemima Harrison of Passionate Productions told the Times.
Sounds more like supermarket tabloid material, doesn' it?
posted by junebee @ 1:14 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Very interesting. I will have to write the date down so I don't miss the documentary. I had seen the headlines on yahoo, but mis-read it to say "Human Quadruplets"
Well, I remember hearing about this family in Mexico who are covered completely in fur like wolves, so I guess there's no end to the amount of strange defects and stuff that you can find in this world. Seems like it'll be an interesting documentary!
once in a while..I have also read about parents who put their children into cage..barely crawling space..locked up for years..and eventually the children took on the uncanny behavoir of crawling among other things....creepy stuff!
Where do you find this shit??? Okay, I know it's not funny, but still...sheesh!
And is that BBC America? We can see it? We humans are pretty fascinating creatures, n'est ce pas?
We have some in my neighborhood.
Spider Walk: See, you have to read the whole word! (Actually, I've done that myself, made an assumption based on the first few letters of the world).
Crystal: I think I recall hearing about those Mexican furritos...
Black Feline: Yeah, those are sad stories. Some of the children can never interact properly with other people. It's so sad.
Lin: Believe it or not, I just stumble over them without much effort! For example, that article was right on the home page of Yahoo
yesterday. I found the article about the Chinese lady singing AC/DC songs
thru a link someone else mentioned about another story on their blog. I imagine we'll be seeing this on one cable station or another at some point.
Don Wood: That's right, you do. They're called politicians. (Note: Don Wood hails from the DC area...)
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