Thanks for sharing this 60 minutes video “Remote Village where people walk on all fours”. I’d never heard of this before.
The story of this family is compelling, but I’m turned off by the secrecy tone and early statements in this 60 minutes episode by the anchor and then one of the talking heads that this family could “rewrite evolutionary history” and they are an example of “modern human beings could return to an animal…” It seems they are falling into the trope where we refer to people who are different (often people of color or handicapped folks) as less than human.
This wikipedia article on this family is a lot less hype filled. Quote from Wikipedia:
However, Nicholas Humphrey, who accompanied the documentary makers, concluded that it was due to a rare set of genetic and developmental circumstances coming together. First, their mother recalls that initially all of her 19 children started off walking with a bear-crawl (i.e. on their feet rather than their knees). Second, due to an inherited recessive genetic mutation, they have a non-progressive congenital cerebellar ataxia that impairs the balance children normally use to learn to walk bipedally. Not being able to manage the balance needed for bipedal walking, they perfected in its place their initial bear-crawl into an adult quadruped gait. The family’s walking likely has nothing to do with genes involved in the human evolution of upright walk.
