Human hand-walkers: five siblings who never stood up
Humphrey, Nicholas and 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. Official URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CPNSS/ AbstractHuman 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) |
|---|
| 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. |
|---|
| Rights: | http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/rights/LSERO.htm |
|---|
| 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 (General) R Medicine (General) GN Anthropology |
|---|
| Sets: | Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) |
|---|
| Identification Number: | DP 77/05 |
|---|
| ID Code: | 463 |
|---|
| Deposited By: | Prof Nicholas Humphrey |
|---|
| Deposited On: | 06 Mar 2006 |
|---|
| Last Modified: | 29 Jun 2009 10:11 |
|---|
LSE Research Online Staff Only: item control page
|