Right up there with Giberson’s photoshopped human tail.
From ScienceDaily:
Contradicting earlier claims, “The Family That Walks on All Fours,” a group of quadrupedal humans made famous by a 2006 BBC documentary, have simply adapted to their inability to walk upright and do not represent an example of backward evolution, according to new research by Liza Shapiro, an anthropologist at The University of Texas at Austin.
Five siblings in the family, who live in a remote corner of Turkey, walk exclusively on their hands and feet. Since they were discovered in 2005, scientists have debated the nature of their disability, with speculation they represent a backward stage of evolution.
Shapiro’s study, published online this month in PLOS One, shows that contrary to previous claims, people with the family members’ condition, called Uner Tan Syndrome (UTS), do not walk in the diagonal pattern characteristic of nonhuman primates such as apes and monkeys.
Apparently, this finding blows out of the water
a human model for reverse evolution, or “devolution,” offering new insights into the human transition from four-legged to two-legged walking.
Previous research countering this view has proposed that the quadrupedalism associated with UTS is simply an adaptive response to the impaired ability to walk bipedally in individuals with a genetic mutation, but this is the first study that disproves claims that this form of walking resembles that of nonhuman primates.
When tested, they walked like almost all current humans do, when asked to walk on all fours.
According to the findings, nearly all human subjects (in 98 percent of the total strides) walked in lateral sequences, meaning they placed a foot down and then a hand on the same side and then moved in the same sequence on the other side. Apes and other nonhuman primates, however, walk in a diagonal sequence, in which they put down a foot on one side and then a hand on the other side, continuing that pattern as they move along.
So, as turns out, modern folklore. As a general rule, if it sounds like folklore, it’s folklore.
Thank heavens at least someone doesn’t believe it, either the ancient or the modern kind. Maybe those people can get into rehab.
Note: If you listened to folklore in the ancient world, whenever people felt unsafe, they heard that children were being born looking like animals and such. Seems that if it was truly outlandish, it always happened in a faroff district, never in the hut next door, where you could poke your head into the cradle and see … and if ever you did, it would probably turn out something like this.
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