Family Who Walks on All Four Limbs Shocks World: Are They the Missing Link?

The world was shocked when a documentary featured a family that walked on all fours, putting into question all the evolution humans have gone through in their time on Earth.

Certain members of the Ulas family based in Turkey walk on all four of their limbs, keeping their palms in a "bear crawl" grip, the New York Post reported.

The Ulas family was made the focus of a 2006 documentary on the BBC called "The Family That Walks on All Fours." 

Professor Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics, received a call from a colleague John Skyoles, who talked to him about an unpublished paper by Turkish professor Uner Tan, regarding a family with quadruped human beings.

The paper concentrated on whether the kids used their left or right hand for doing a particular task, as per the documentary. Humphrey and other experts wanted to know more about the family.

Humphrey, accompanied the documentary filmmakers to witness the family's daily life with his own eyes. The family had 19 children, of which, six were hand-walking individuals. Another person, who was born into the family with this unique condition died before the documentary.

Researchers associated with Liverpool University looked into the children of the family who were walking on all fours, Daily Star reported. After looking at their skeletons, the researchers concluded that the bone structure of the children was more similar to apes than to humans.

The brains of the afflicted children also had a shrunken cerebellum. Usually, this condition does not impact walking, but it was noted as a common link between the affected kids.

One difference between apes and these humans was noted, The New York Post reported. The apes use their knuckles to move around while for these humans it is the palm of their hands that serves this function.

Humphrey was astounded on seeing the condition of the children, 60 Minutes Australia reported. "I never expected that even under the most extraordinary scientific fantasy that modern human beings could return to an animal state," Humphrey said. 

Humphrey explained in the interview that the trait that makes humans different from others is their ability to walk with their heads high, 60 Minutes Australia reported. He added, "Of course, it’s language and all other sorts of things, too, but it’s terribly important to our sense of ourselves as being different from others in the animal kingdom. These people cross that boundary."

In the documentary, the Ulas family has been described as "the missing link between man and ape."

Tan's paper suggests that a 'devolution' might have happened for the family, The New York Post reported. 

Humphrey dismisses this theory in the documentary and calls such a suggestion "deeply insulting" and "scientifically irresponsible."

"I think it’s possible that what we are seeing in this family is something that does correspond to a time when we didn’t walk like chimpanzees but was an important step between coming down from the trees and becoming fully bipedal," Humphrey suggested, The New York Post reported.

Humphrey also noted that the children in the family afflicted with the condition were never encouraged to walk. He believes that providing the afflicted children with resources that would help them to walk, might bring a change in their condition. 

The afflicted children were provided with a physiotherapist and other equipment which led to huge improvement, The New York Post reported. The next time Humphrey visited the family he was happy to see the progress in all of them.

The documentary ended with Hüseyin, one of the afflicted kids, walking on two legs.