<img alt="quadrupeds.JPG" src="http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further/archives/quadrupeds.JPG" width="200" height="339" align="left" hspace="6" vspace="6" />

<em>An utterly bizarre story about a Turkish scientist who claims to have made humans regress back to an ape-like prehuman form:</em>

“This syndrome interestingly exhibits prehuman features” and represents “possible backward evolution,” [Uner Tan] wrote in a paper describing the condition. As such, it “can be considered a live model for human evolution.”

The paper appears in the March issue of the International Journal of Neuroscience, where Tan sits on the editorial board. He also named the disorder after himself: Unertan syndrome.

“The children exhibiting this syndrome originated from a family having 19 children,” he wrote in another recent paper, in the journal Neuroquantology. Five of these, aged 14 to 32 years, “walked on two palms and two feet, with extended legs… They could stand up, but only for a short time, with flexed knees and heads.”

“The patients had a rather primitive language... they spoke to each other using their own language, using only a few hundred words” which the parents could partly understand...

“The sitting posture was rather similar to an ape,” Tan added. “They could not hold their heads upright; the heads were flexed forward with their skulls. They could not raise their heads to look forward. This head posture with flexed skull was rather similar to the head posture of our closest relatives, like chimpanzees.”

Full story <a href="http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/060221_unertanfrm.htm" target="new">here</a>, plus a video of <a href="http://www.neuroquantology.com/2005/04/Tan%20movie.mpg" target="new">his subjects in action</a>.

Thanks Ben Goldacre!