Ulas family

The Ulas family is a large family of 19 from rural southern Turkey, five 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.

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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 ^[1].

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 Unertan syndrome ^[2].

However, Nicholas Humphrey and colleagues have argued that their gait is due to two rare phenomena coming together ^[3]. 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.

See also

• Knuckle-walking
• Bipedalism
• Quadruped

Notes