Family discovered walking on all fours 'could be missing link between man and ape'

dailyrecord.co.uk:

An evolution expert says a family who walk on all fours appears to defy everything we thought we knew about humans.Some members of the Ulas family, from Turkey, have a unique quadrupedal gait that had never been seen elsewhere.The family were first documented in a scientific paper, and then a BBC documentary titled The Family That Walks on All Fours which was released in 2006.Professor Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics, found six of the family's 18 children were born with the remarkable trait, but one of them has since died.Speaking on a 60 Minutes Australia documentary, he said: "I never expected that even under the most extraordinary scientific fantasy that modern human beings could return to an animal state."The thing which marks us off from the rest of the animal world is the fact that we're the species which walks on two legs and olds out heads high in the air...

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."The documentary described the family as potentially "the missing link between man and ape", saying they have "untold significance for every one of us" and "shouldn't exist".The Turkish scientists who published the first paper postulated that some form of "devolution" could have taken place.

He wondered whether this could be a genetic problem that had somehow rewound three millions years of evolution.However, Prof Humphreys told the BBC documentary that this description was "deeply insulting" and "scientifically irresponsible".The affected children's brains were found to have a shrunken cerebellum, but other