Ulas family

The Ulas family is a large family of 19 from rural southern Turkey, five (except for another, who had died)Fact|date=October 2008 of whom walk on all fours with their feet and the palms of their hands in what is called a "bear crawl". Their quadrupedal gait has never been reported in anatomically intact adult humans. The gait is different from the knuckle-walking quadrupedal gait of apes. In 2006, the family was the subject of a documentary: "The Family That Walks On All Fours".

The affected siblings have a form of non-progressive congenital cerebellar ataxia. The brain impairments include cerebellar hypoplasia, mild cerebral cortex atrophy and a reduced corpus callosum. They are also mildly retarded and have problems in balancing on two legs. However, they do not show the poor coordination of hands, speech, and eye movements often found in cerebellar ataxia. The four sisters can do needlework. They all share a recessive mutation on chromosome 17p [ Turkmen S, Demirhan O, Hoffmann K, Diers A, Zimmer C, Sperling K, Mundlos S. "Cerebellar hypoplasia and quadrupedal locomotion in humans as a recessive trait mapping to chromosome 17p." J Med Genet. 2006 May;43(5):461-4. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16371500&query_hl=58&itool=pubmed_docsum] ] .

Source

Uner Tan of Cukurova University Medical School in Adana, Turkey, has claimed that they show characteristics of the primate ancestors of Homo sapiens, before the move to bipedalism. He calls the process "backward evolution" and he named the condition Uner Tan syndrome [ Tan, Uner. "A new syndrome with quadrupedal gait, primitive speech, and severe mental retardation as a live model for human evolution" Int J Neurosci. 2006 Mar;116(3):361-9. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16484061&query_hl=54&itool=pubmed_docsum] ] .

However, Nicholas Humphrey, John Skoyles, and Roger Keynes have argued that their gait is due to two rare phenomena coming together Humphrey, N., Keynes, R. & Skoyles, J. R. (2005). "Hand-walkers : five siblings who never stood up". Discussion Paper. Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London, UK. [http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000463/01/CPNSS2.pdf] ] . First, instead of initially crawling as infants on their knees, they started off learning to move around with a “bear crawl” on their feet. Second, due to their congenital brain impairment, they found balancing on two legs difficult. Because this, their motor development was channeled into turning their bear crawl into a substitute for bipedality.

ee also

*Knuckle-walking
*Bipedalism
*Quadruped
* Uner Tan syndrome

Notes