More than 50 million years ago, primates began to evolve radially, differentiating into higher primates such as macaques, baboons, and apes.
Among them, primitive apes underwent a long evolution, about 200,000 to 2 million years ago, Homo erectus appeared in Africa, and humans finally got rid of the history of limb walking. Start to put your feet on the ground, use your hands to create tools, use tools, use your brain, and step by step towards a scientific and civilized society.
In the 21st century, when scientific civilization is highly developed, there are still people crawling on all fours, and it is even more strange that not only one person is like this, but the whole village is like this.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="3" > weird behavior</h1>
This peculiar village was first discovered in Ethiopia, located in northeastern Africa.
Ethiopia borders Sudan and South Sudan to the west, and more than half of the country is a plateau, so it is also known as the roof of Africa. Ethiopia is a member of the African Union and has a long history of more than 3,000 years, which contains many primitive tribes that have continued from ancient times to the present day.
Although Ethiopia protects its traditional culture well, it lacks the economic base to take its essence and remove its dross. Ethiopia's national economy is basically dominated by agriculture, the industrial base is quite weak, and it is currently one of the least developed countries in the world.
Here, its industrial facilities, cultural education, science popularization and other work are naturally backward. It is this environment that makes scientists more enthusiastic about exploring the primitive villages in Ethiopia, because modernization and backwardness means the preservation of primitives.
A fortuitous discovery did not live up to the expectations of scientists. When the team entered a small village in Ethiopia, they accidentally found that the people here were crawling and walking on all fours.
The team also thought that this walking posture was obtained by some kind of sacrifice of the day, or a unique ceremony of welcoming outsiders by the villagers, or a prank.
In order to test the various conjectures, the scientific research team concluded through many days of observation that this is the daily walk of the villagers. Through visits and investigations, the research team found that almost the entire village was operating in a gibbon-like four-legged crawl.
This phenomenon of crawling did not only occur in this generation, it has existed in previous generations, and can even go back to a much older era. The team began to wonder why humans, who had escaped the four-legged reptile millions of years earlier, were now returning to primitive ape behavior.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > the phenomenon of atavism</h1>
The so-called regression phenomenon refers to the genetic phenomenon that some organisms accidentally appear certain traits of the ancestors. This phenomenon is evidence of biological evolution, reflecting some of the characteristics of the organism's primitive ancestors, and when certain traits similar to those of the primitive ancestors appear, it also means the degradation of the organism.
This phenomenon of return to ancestors is particularly rare, but it does exist, and may appear in people's daily lives, people will occasionally find that some children love long hair, growing on the abdomen, thighs, back, face and other places where normal people do not grow thick hair.
There are even children who are found to have long and short tails at birth and look like apes, and it is these special phenomena that have been discovered by accident that prove that the primitive ancestors of humans came from ancient apes. However, the "degradation" brought about by the phenomenon of atavism is not necessarily a disadvantage for all living things.
Domestic chickens, ducks, geese, has long lost the ability to fly, but occasionally there will be a particularly strong flying ability of chickens, ducks, geese, this is also a phenomenon of return to the ancestors, so that its flight ability has been restored, for chickens, ducks, geese, such a phenomenon of return to the ancestors is undoubtedly an advantage.
For humans who are already walking upright, the "atavistic phenomenon" of relying on crawling on all fours is not an advantage. Because of the long-term reliance on crawling, it has led to the distortion and deformation of people's bones, especially the crotch, waist, and hips.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="9" > traced back to the source</h1>
While continuing to study and explore reptile villages, coincidentally, the same villages have been found in the remote mountains of Guizhou, China, and almost all the people in the villages are crawling and walking.
The strange behavior in this village that is different from ordinary people has attracted many people to watch and explore once it has been disseminated by the media.
For the crawling behavior of the villagers in the crawling village, the first thing that people accept is the "return to the ancestor phenomenon", that is, the villagers have produced the phenomenon of return to the ancestors, so they will walk on all fours like apes.
However, the phenomenon of returning to ancestors in the whole village is really not very reliable, and the probability of returning to ancestors is quite low, and most of the people in the same area have all returned to their ancestors, which is a very small probability.
In subsequent studies, it did negate the possibility of the full occurrence of the phenomenon of return to the ancestors. Later, researchers found that newborn babies in the village could learn to walk slowly like children from the outside world.
When they grow up, they still crawl and walk because their parents, including the surrounding villages, are crawling and have not been taught the correct way of walking upright, and children learn from the crawling adults, and finally get used to it and lose the ability to walk upright.
What neither Ethiopia nor the reptile villages in the mountains of Guizhou, China, have in common is that they have little contact with outsiders and are almost isolated.
Their isolation from the world is not the comfort in "Peach Blossom Origin", but the strange way of behaving. The closure brings not only tranquility and the protection of primitive village traditions, but also ignorance and crisis.
Researchers seem to be able to explain the phenomenon of creeping villages through this common point of creeping villages.
It is precisely because of the closed environment of the creeping village in the mountains of Ethiopia and Guizhou, China, that the descendants of the crawl lack the normal guidance of normal people, lack contact with normal people, and have no cognition of upright walking, so the day after tomorrow has formed a walking posture of crawling on all fours.
It is said that parents are the child's first teachers, and the family is the child's first learning environment. Children are accustomed to imitating the dynamics of their parents and surroundings, and in an environment surrounded by crawlers, even if children are normal, it is very easy to learn to crawl on all fours.
Is that the end of the study here? Not really.
The corresponding question arises, since the offspring are formed by imitating the behavior of their parents, then where did their parents, so that the previous generation to the original creeper learn to crawl?
Because the creeping village is isolated from the world and hardly interacts with outsiders, they do not communicate with the outside world to get married, and the people in the same village are with the people in their own village in order to reproduce.
Therefore, there may be a marriage of close relatives, and the marriage of close relatives is prone to some strange problems, such as a disease called cerebellar ataxia.
Some researchers speculate that the original reptile may be a patient with cerebellar ataxia, because the reptile village is located in a remote area, far away from other townships and villages, a large number of people have adopted the way of marriage between close relatives to reproduce offspring, resulting in a large number of cerebellar ataxia patients in the offspring.
As normal older people gradually pass away over time, how many young cerebellar ataxia patients remaining in the village, their children, grow up in the daily life of crawling, and begin to learn the crawling style of adults consciously or unconsciously.
The adults in this village did not have a good enlightenment for newborns, they just lived by crawling, never experienced standing, so they did not know how to teach children to stand, so the normal children who learned to crawl could not be corrected, and they became another person who crawled on all fours.
This is undoubtedly a vicious circle. In the offspring of these creepers, in addition to normal children, there will still be children who have their own "cerebellar disorders".
They can't stand on their own, and when they mingle with normal children, they blur the boundaries between crawling and standing in normal children.
The explanation of cerebellar ataxia and acquired learning theory is more convincing than the phenomenon of atavism. The probability of genetic diseases brought about by the marriage of close relatives is much greater than the probability of the phenomenon of return to ancestors, and in an isolated environment, it is not difficult to understand the cognitive bias of normal people.
However, in addition to the conjecture of the phenomenon of return to ancestors and the assumption that the marriage of close relatives brought offspring cerebellar ataxia, the conjecture that genetic mutations cause genetic defects has also been mentioned.
Because some of the predecessors had a genetic mutation, the mutation would behave accordingly in the limbs. He passed on this defective gene and diffused it by his offspring, eventually covering it in a closed environment.
But no matter what kind of speculation, the final conclusion, the researchers have not yet made up their minds. It is now known that the people of the creeping village are able to live on their limbs and move not slowly, from small children to the elderly are very skilled.
Although this crawling posture causes the distortion of the bones and makes the limbs look strange, through the examination of experts, in addition to the strangeness of the body, the rest of their bodies are very healthy, and there is no obstacle in their daily lives.
Based on the above research and speculation, a team entered the creeping village and began to guide normal children and young people to learn to stand. Children and young people are more capable of learning and more receptive to new things from outside, and perhaps this will be a breakthrough in changing the creeping village.
In addition, researchers have also tried to treat crawlers in ways to treat patients with cerebellar ataxia. Through the clinical application of conventional drug therapy and rehabilitation training, some crawlers have improved their balance and coordination.
I hope that these efforts can make the creeping village out of the self-contained, understand the normal world outside, but also hope that the people outside of the crawling village have more love and understanding of the people of the creeping village, through the above parallel treatment and guidance methods, the crawling village may become a legend in the near future.