It's a story about a family in Turkey that has five members who suffer from a genetic anomaly that supposedly makes the quadrapedal, as in walking on all fours: Cuadrúpedos humanos en Turquía El Mundo 08.03.06. El Mundo is not a tabloid, it's one of Spain's leading papers (with various Latin American versions). This family is supposed to be the subject of a BBC documentary airing March 17.
The El Mundo article talks about how studies of this family might shed light on the process of human evolution.
Count me interested in the story. But I want to know some more about this before I start taking this version as established fact. A quick bit of googling turned up references to publications on these cases from the Journal of Medical Genetics and the International Journal of Neuroscience, the latter of which has an article of his in the March 2006 issue (abstract here).
Here's a paper by the Turkish physiologist, Uner Tan, who claims to have discovered this genetic condition, which apparently he modestly named after himself: Unertan Syndrome: Quadrupedality, Primitive Language, and Severe Mental Retardation - A New Theory on the Evolution of Human Mind by Uner Tan NeuroQuantology 2005.
I'm pretty skeptical based on my initial exposure to this story.
It could make a good Kate Campbell song, though.
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