The Family That Walks On All Fours
| The Family That Walks On All Fours | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Documentary |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | Jemima Harrison |
| Running time | 59:10 |
| Production company(s) | Passionate Productions |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC Two |
| Original release | 17 March 2006 |
| External links | |
| Website | www |
The Family That Walks On All Fours is a BBC Two documentary that explored the science and the story of five individuals in the Ulas family that walk with a previously unreported quadruped gait.
The documentary about the Kurdish family in Turkey was created by Passionate Productions and was broadcast on Friday 17 March 2006. The narrator is Jemima Harrison. A revised version of the documentary that shifts the focus away from the story of the discovery of the family and includes the views of additional scientists was shown on NOVA on 14 November 2006.
Debate exists as to the nature and cause of the family's walking, including controversial speculation in the form of the Uner Tan syndrome that it may be a genetic throwback to pre-bipedal hominid locomotion. 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.
The origin of the documentary is explained: Nicholas Humphrey at his Cambridge home in June 2005 receives a call from Dr. John Skoyles who has seen an unpublished paper by Turkish Professor Uner Tan that focuses upon hand dominance in the family. Humphrey explains his reaction and why the British scientists go off immediately to Turkey.
...
Wikipedia