Human quadrupeds discovered in Turkey

Sam Lister in Fox News:

Five brothers and sisters who can only walk naturally on all fours are being hailed as a unique insight into human evolution after being found in a remote corner of rural Turkey.

Scientists believe that the family may provide invaluable information on how man evolved from a four-legged hominid to develop the ability to walk on two feet more than three million years ago.

A genetic abnormality, which may prevent the siblings, aged 18 to 34, from walking upright, has been identified...

Nicholas Humphrey, evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who has visited the family, said that the siblings appeared to have reverted to an instinctive form of behavior encoded deep in the brain, but abandoned in the course of evolution.

More here.  [Thanks to Afshan Hussain.]

Comments

[Bill Hooker]

Pictures here, research paper here (subscr. only I'm afraid).

[Bill Hooker]

Another paper here; anyone ever heard of "Neuroquantology"? My crackpot detector is tingling.

[Bill Hooker]

One more: descriptive paper from the London School of Economics here (free), mol biol paper here (subscr. only).

[Justin]

Amazing. I encourage everyone to read the paper from the LSE researcher to which Hooker links. I could not ask for more timely confirmation of the thesis I pushed recently in 3QD (in a piece which, admittedly, fell stillborn from the typepad: http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/02/selected_minor_.html) on the significance of bipedalism for marking out humanity's sense of the vast ontological gap between itself and the brutes. Notice the way the British researchers refer to the members of the Turkish family as "males" and "females", as opposed to men and women, even in describing deep, complex human interaction with them. Notice how the villagers gossip that the quadrupedal siblings cannot speak, even though they clearly can. It is as though we are constrained, likely for evolutionary reasons, to take bipedalism as a sign of linguistic ability, and to take the latter as a sign of the inherence of a soul or mind that confers true humanity.

These quadrupedal Turks have me reeling. I shall have to return to this topic in a future column.

[Abbas Raza]

Very interesting! Thanks for the links, Bill.

Justin, your article (which didn't get as much attention as it deserved) is vindicated. I'll look forward to more from you...

[anon]

this has really creepy echoes of nineteenth-century western scientists, obsessed with theories of evolution, "studying" and marveling at "freaks" they "discovered" around the world. well, one hopes that these scientists don't kidnapp the family to parade them at conferences around europe and north america.

[Bill Hooker]

Carl Zimmer got some feedback from one of the British scientists. I think Zimmer's take on the whole circus is pretty good -- see the updates to his "human evolution" post that you linked earlier.