News of the bizarre!<\/p>\n
Scientists have discovered a family in Turkey in which the five children walk on all fours because they’re unable to stand upright<\/a>. They speculate that the children may have suffered a genetic disorder–their parents are noted as being closely related–and they’ve reverted to an instinctual form of human mobility.<\/p>\n Rather than walking on their knuckles, like gorillas or chimpanzees, they walk on the palms of their hands, with their fingers spread upwards.<\/p>\n Scientists believe this may be the way hominids moved to protect their fingers for more delicate movements.<\/p>\n Prof Humphrey said he thought the family had reverted to an instinctive form of behaviour encoded deep in the brain but abandoned during evolution.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n ‘It has produced an extraordinary window on our past. It is physically possible, which no one would have guessed from the modern human skeleton.”<\/p>\n Study of their hands has shown they are heavily callused and have been walking like this for years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most bizarre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" News of the bizarre! Scientists have discovered a family in Turkey in which the five children walk on all fours because they’re unable to stand upright. They speculate that the children may have suffered a genetic disorder–their parents are noted as being closely related–and they’ve reverted to an instinctual form of human mobility. Rather thanContinue reading “On a Bizarre Walking Behavior”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1062,4105,1063],"class_list":["post-711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-anthropology","tag-news","tag-strange","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}