Looks about right to me given the different way the bendy bits go.
Why should her athleticism be any more or less of a “freak show” than sitting on the back of an animal and making it do tricks? It’s not like you are going to get drafted to run like a horse any more than I’m going to get drafted to ride one.
I’m down with all the comments re. broken wrists and spinal discs etc. but… are there any conceivable BENEFITS from this wondrous badassness? Or is it all bad news for her poor bod?
Any doctors in the house? Or even people who play one on TV^H^HBBS?
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.
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 congenitalcerebellar 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.
As for this woman, who knows why she does it, and more power to it if it’s harmless fun or whatever. I do wonder, though, if it’s gotten to her body’s structure in some bad ways, like say, violinists who develop long term spinal and other problems (which is not to say that that happens to all violinists).
Dunno, but mainstream gymnastics floor routines also seem like they would be hard on the wrists…so I’m not sure that this kind of “horse jumping” is any worse than that, though this woman doesn’t seem to be using padded ground the way gymnasts do (but she’s also probably not getting the damage from practicing many hours a day that top gymnasts do, either, so I dunno…)