Remote village where people walk on all fours | 60 Minutes Australia

You're about to see something truly astounding a discovery that's caused an absolute sensation

one that could have untold significance for every one of us and not only that it's a totally engrossing mystery story -

You're about to meet a family that shouldn't exist a family like no other

They could just be the missing link between man and ape the holy grail. Scientists have sought for generations

their living breathing men and women

But they walk on all fours just as we did four million years ago and until this film was shot

They were hidden away

unseen by the outside world

Remote village in Turkey here hidden from the world lives an

Extraordinary family a family whose very existence could rewrite the evolution textbooks

It was really fascinated, you know, here are humans doing things that they're not meant to be doing

For the past year, their existence has been known to just a handful of experts who have been sworn to secrecy

When I heard of it myself I was intrigued but nothing prepared me for the reality

Now finally the secret can be revealed

Immediate response I had was of itis I couldn't believe my eyes. I never expected that

Even under the most extraordinary scientific fantasy that modern human beings could return to an animal state

In scientific terms, it was the equivalent of finding living breathing fossils

Human beings who had never made the evolutionary leap of standing upright

The quest to find out why took a team of scientists on an amazing journey and raised profound

Questions about what it is to be human

thing which marks us off from the rest of the animal world is the fact that we're the species which walks on two legs and

Holds our heads high in the air

It's what defines us as in many ways yes, of course its language and all sorts of other things too, but

It's terribly important to our sense of ourselves as being different from from others in the animal kingdom

These people cross that boundary professor Nick Humphrey is an evolutionary psychologist

He first heard of the family through a medical paper produced by Turkish scientists

It looks as if we really did have something rather like a throwback an evolution of turning back the evolutionary clock

and the Turkish professor who invited us say

That's the way he thought about it. In fact others in the scientific community took up that line and said yes

sir for the world is a is a

Genetic problem which has undone of the last three million years of evolution returned them to a primitive stage

it sounded like the anthropological find of the millennium

A once-in-a-lifetime discovery that scientists dream of if the family proved to be true quadrupeds walking on all fours