3/9/2006: Quadruped humans (and international science)

[Undertoad]

These people are all from the same inbred family. They aren't playing, this is how they walk. Are they A) spazzes, B) severely mentally handicapped, or C) evidence of backward evolution in humans?

That's the controversy started by Turkish researcher Uner Tan. Tan described the people in the first full story:

"The children exhibiting this syndrome originated from a family having 19 children," he wrote in another recent paper, in the journal Neuroquantology. Five of these, aged 14 to 32 years, "walked on two palms and two feet, with extended legs… They could stand up, but only for a short time, with flexed knees and heads."

"The patients had a rather primitive language... they spoke to each other using their own language, using only a few hundred words" which the parents could partly understand, Tan wrote.

"They were mentally retarded; they could not count from one to ten. They were not aware of time and space. For instance, they did not know where they live (which country, which village, which city). They were unaware of year, season, day, and time. Otherwise, they had quite strong legs and arms."

Here's a weird movie clip of one of the woman moving along on all fours.

You would think this is some sort of genetic freakdom. Tan went a step further to say the freakdom might be traceable to one particular gene, which these people were missing. Tan then argued that...

the mutation—known to run in one Turkish family—might offer scientists an unprecedented glimpse into human origins.

"This syndrome interestingly exhibits prehuman features" and represents "possible backward evolution," he wrote in a paper describing the condition. As such, it "can be considered a live model for human evolution."

Devolution on display via inbreeding? This prompted some skepticism in the scientific community. But now it's gone a step further (so to speak), as UK researchers working with the BBC to make a documentary have paid the family for exclusive access.

This outraged Tan, who complained that it was misconduct. Then the UK researchers pointed out that it wasn't Tan who found the family first anyway, and called some of Tan's claims "bizarre".

Who's right? Don't know. The last World Science article on the subject says that US genetics researcher Keith Crandall says reverse human evolution is plausible and, more important, testable.

And that, in turn, means that the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing drooler who sits next to you is not just an uneducatable doof, but evidence of the return of humanity to its genetic origin... the caveman.