Ula’s family walking on all fours ‘shouldn’t exist’, scientists say

All families have their own quirks and customs, but one group of relatives has such a unique trait that scientists have labeled them a total anomaly of the human species.

The Ulas family has been the subject of evolutionary fascination for years after they were discovered on their hands and knees in a remote village in Turkey.

In the early 2000s, a scientific paper was published about five of Ulas’ siblings and their strange movement style, dividing experts over the cause of the abnormality.

In the years following the article’s publication, evolutionary psychologist Professor Nicholas Humphrey of the London School of Economics (LSE) traveled to Turkey to meet the extraordinary family.

Ulas’ mother and father had as many as 18 children, but of those, only six were born with quadrupedalism (walking on all fours), which has never before been seen in modern adults.

The skin on the palms of their hands is as thick as on their feet60 minutes Australia

“I never expected that even under the most extraordinary scientific imagination, modern man could return to an animal state,” Humphrey said. 60 minutes Australiawho made a documentary about the family in 2018.

“What sets us apart from the rest of the animal world is the fact that we belong to the species that walks on two legs and holds our heads high in the air,” he added.

‘Of course it’s language and all kinds of other things, but it is extremely important for our feeling that we are different from others in the animal kingdom. These people cross that line.”

The documentary describes the Ulas as “the missing link between man and ape” and suggests that they “shouldn’t exist at all”.

And yet no one has yet discovered the exact cause of the strange walking style.

While some experts have suggested that it is caused by a genetic problem that has “undone the last three million years of evolution,” others have dismissed the idea that there is a specific “gene” for upright walking and suggested that something else plays a role. plays.

Humphrey pointed out that the affected siblings – five of whom are still alive and aged between 22 and 38 – all suffer from some form of brain damage.

In the 60 minutes In the documentary he showed MRI scans that showed they all had a shrunken part of the brain called the cerebellar vermis.

However, the professor also noted that this in itself “(doesn’t) explain that they walk on four legs.”

He explained: “Other children who have damaged cerebellum, even children who have no cerebellum, can still walk upright.”

He also emphasized that the form of quadrupedalism in the Ulas differs in one important way from that in our closest animal relatives – chimpanzees and gorillas.

While these primates walk on their knuckles, the Turkish children use the palms of their hands – placing their weight on their wrists while lifting their fingers off the ground.

“What’s special about that is that chimpanzees ruin their fingers when they walk like that,” Humphrey said BBC news website from 2006, when the BBC broadcast its own documentary about the family.

Family walking on all fours – Full documentarywww.youtube.com

“These children have kept their fingers very dexterous, for example, the girls in the family can crochet and embroider,” he added.

Humphrey has hypothesized that this could indeed be the way our direct ancestors walked.

Keeping their fingers dexterous would also have allowed our early predecessors to manipulate tools, which was crucial to the evolution of the human body and intelligence.

“I think it’s possible that what we’re seeing in this family is something that corresponds to a time when we didn’t walk like chimpanzees, but that it was an important step between coming out of the trees and becoming fully bipedal,” Humphrey told the news. place.

The LSE researcher also suggested that there are more fundamental explanations for the Ulas children’s quadrupedalism: they were simply not encouraged to walk on two feet.

In the Turkish village where they grew up, there was no local health care available to help the disabled children transition from crawling as babies (on their hands and knees) to walking fully upright.

Humphrey told it 60 minutes that he provided the Ulases with a walking frame and within a few hours “there was an astonishing transformation.”

“The kids who had never taken a step upright on two legs (used) this frame to walk around the room with such joy in their faces and a sense of achievement,” he recalled, adding that it was as if they were ” suddenly a breakthrough into the world they never thought they could ever enter.”

Bars have been installed at the Ulas house to encourage family members to walk upright60 minutes Australia

He said seeing their enthusiasm for walking upright, with the help of physiotherapists, gave him “newfound respect for the human spirit”.

He said it helped him see “how people in the most disadvantaged circumstances can overcome adversity, no matter what they have to do to maintain their pride and sense of themselves.”

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