Humphrey, Nicholas, Skoyles, John R. and Keynes, Roger (2005) Human hand-walkers: five siblings who never stood up. DP 77/05. Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.
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Abstract
Human beings begin life as quadrupeds, crawling on all fours, but none has ever been known to retain this gait and develop it into a proficient replacement for adult bipedality. We report the case of a family in which five siblings, who suffer from a rare form of cerebellar ataxia, are still quadrupeds as adults - walking and running on their feet and wrists. We describe the remarkable features of this gait, discuss how it has developed in the members of this family, and consider whether a similar gait may have been used by human ancestors.
| Item Type: | Monograph (Discussion Paper) |
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| Official URL: | http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CPNSS/ |
| Additional Information: | Published 2005 © London School of Economics and Political Science. LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Human locomotion, quadrupedalism, bipedalism, crawling, bear-crawl, cerebellar ataxia, dysequilibrium syndrome, knuckle-walking, wrist-walking, atavism, human evolution, BBC documentary |
| Library of Congress subject classification: | Q Science > Q Science (General) R Medicine > R Medicine (General) G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology |
| Sets: | Research centres and groups > Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) |
| Rights: | http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/rights/LSERO.htm |
| Identification Number: | DP 77/05 |
| URL: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/463/ |
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