This Turkish family walks on all fours, leaving scientists bewildered

Of the 18 children in this family, six were born with this trait never before seen in modern human adults. (Representational image: Unsplash)

Members of the Ulas family in Turkey have baffled scientists with their gait -- they walk on all fours, using the palms of their hands in a “bear crawl" -- challenging the world’s understanding of human evolution.

This unusual quadrupedal gait has never before reported in adult modern humans, researchers claimed. The family first came into the limelight through a scientific paper, followed by a 2006 BBC documentary titled "The Family That Walks on All Fours".

An evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics, professor Nicholas Humphrey, found that out of the 18 children in this family, six were born with this trait never before seen in modern human adults. One of the six kids has since died.

"I never expected that even under the most extraordinary scientific fantasy that modern human beings could return to an animal state," Humphrey said in the documentary 60 Minutes Australia. "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 holds our 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 also described the Ulas family as potentially "the missing link between man and ape", asserting their "untold significance for every one of us" and claiming they "shouldn't exist".

In a ground-breaking study, Turkish scientists theorised that some form of "devolution" might have occurred, causing a genetic reversion of around 3 million years of evolution causing such a trait in this family. But professor Humphrey rejected this notion, and called it "deeply insulting" and "scientifically irresponsible" in a BBC documentary.

"I think it's possible that what we are seeing in this family is something that does correspond to a time when we didn't walk like chimpanzees but was an important step between coming down from the trees and becoming fully bipedal," he told the BBC.

The professor also noted that since the children in the family were not necessarily encouraged to stand after they turned nine months old and so their development too could have been affected.

As per a report in the New York Post, the children were provided with a physiotherapist and equipment to help them walk on just two feet, which led to significant improvements in their mobility by the time Humphrey returned to Turkey.

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