Humans on all fours: karma, devolution?

I was traveling as a vegan through India which, while mostly Hindu, at that time had about 100 million Muslims. (It now has 200 million or more).

I came to a strangely barren outdoor marketplace made of stone and clay. I watched from a distance as a bad smell of BBQ wafted through the air like an accident. Imagine the smell of burning plastic, upholstery, oil, textiles, and diesel fumes.

Men began to congregate, each at their own stall with animals, mainly sheep, lambs, or goats in tow. I blended in, holding still, just observing. And I began to realize these were butchers, killing animals by slicing their throats, beheading them, draining their blood, separating their corpses into portions, and piling bloody flesh on the stall tops for sale.

Shoppers, Muslims following their religion to eat the dead and Hindus violating theirs by buying carcasses (and therefore paying butchers to kill) for consumption, which is at odds with ahimsa ("nonharming"), were gathering.

• The Dharmic religions enjoin humans to abstain from killing and from encouraging anyone else to kill. Butchers are encouraged to slaughter when people pay them to do it. Am I blameless for eating meat? It would be as if the Mafia godfather were to say, "I've never killed anybody" when he has hired and directed men to kill by paying them to do so. Is he blameless or as blameworthy as those Mafia men for all those killings? Butchers, paid for yesterday's killing, kill for tomorrow in full expectation that there is money to be made by those not doing the dirty work.
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The flies. The dirty hands. The dust and pollution of uncovered stalls. The floors of stalls were a sheen of blood. There was some baying of the young sheep.

The men all seemed very nice, not yelling or argumentative, all in their workaday mode, thinking nothing wrong with slaughtering and selling in unhygienic conditions.

A modern human family walking on all fours?

Then, thinking of karma, I saw it. No one seemed to pay any mind, but I could not wrap my head around what people must be thinking they were seeing and why it was so. People probably go along to get along by not thinking.

An Ulas family member or distant relative, walking on all fours through the blood slats, was going from stall-to-stall begging. He had a Muslim cap like the others and clogs (rope and wood sandals) on his feet, which gave the appearance and sound of cloven hooves, as he ambled from butcher to butcher, who pitied him (or wanted him to move on).

They have him a few coins (backsheesh) or slivers of red flesh. To explain it to myself, I imagined that this man -- in a past life or earlier in this one -- was a butcher like them but then went crazy and decided to go on all four like a dog-duty ascetic.

But he was no ascetic, not one to do penance or tapas (fiery austerities), not Hindu or a member of one of the Dharmic religions. Yet, by his concurrent good deeds, possibly giving to beggars, he managed to gain rebirth in this world (on the human plane) rather than The Downfall (niraya), the worlds of woe that result from killing living beings and other cruelties.

Karma is such that the way it works out is not only strange but incomprehensible, one of the Four Imponderables. It is possible, particularly in this world of mixed karma (skillful and unskillful deeds), that one form of karma interferes with the other. Killers are not always immediately reborn in perdition.

It is possible by good karma (keeping the Five or Eight Precepts) that merit is made that counters unskillful actions for a time. The result of killing animals is not that one will one time be killed or reborn in hell but that it will happen again and again and those mental impulsions (javanas) formed in the doing come to fruition by conditioning a rebirth. One act (good or bad) has exponential karmic-results (vipaka, phala), ripening like fruit.

The man walked like a tall, skinny cow from booth to booth. The butchers gave charity. And he moved on to work the whole marketplace. I turned in disbelief, gobsmacked, and saw a girl selling piles of colorful powder dyes. It is not clear in what, ubiquitous plastic bags or wrapped in yesterday's newspaper. The piles were perfect and very likely synthetic and she seemed miserable to be there.

Then the smell hit me again and I saw smoke. It was a kind of hibachi, and an old Muslim man was placing something on the sooty grill. The smoke did not seem to bother the miserable salesgirl, but from a farther distance, it sure bothered me.

The man smiled at me, seeing my camera. I approached slowly and got close enough to discern what was burning. It was a pile of small heads of recently living lambs. It is the strangest thing to see a beheaded face separated from its torso, disconnected from its neck. The eyes were gently closed and I felt sure they might open at any moment. Was he cooking their brains in the skulls?

Surely, this was butcher offal (trash). What was he doing? I came to understand that he was singing the hair off to sell the heads for buyers to eat the face. Like a dog gnawing on a bone for marrow and gristle, scraps of remaining tendon, the smear of blood or scent of flesh, someone would buy this.

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Price? 5 cents (It's hard to do the arithmetic conversion with moving exchange rates, and this was a long time ago when the US greenback fetched about 40 rupees). The man kindly smiled at me. All the men were nice, seemed nice, seemed well adjusted to their task, with wives and families at home, well-fed with lots of dead meat. India is a kaleidoscope. I thought that man an anomaly. But here is a whole family:

Family that walks on all fours have 'undone the last three million years of evolution'

Story by Harriet Brewis, Indy 100, 8/27/24

The skin on the palms of their hands is as thick as it is on their feet (60 Minutes AUS/Indy 100).

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All families have their own quirks and habits, but one group of relatives has such a distinct trait that scientists have branded them a total anomaly of the human species.

I told you, Darwin. - No, Wallace, I already knew.

The Ulas family has been the subject of evolutionary fascination for years after they were discovered in a remote village in Turkey walking on all fours. Back in the early 2000s, a scientific paper was published on five of the Ulas siblings and their strange bear crawl-style of movement, with experts divided over the cause of the anomaly.

In the years following the paper’s publication, evolutionary psychologist Prof. Nicholas Humphrey of the London School of Economics (LSE) travelled to Turkey to meet with the extraordinary family.

Alfred Wallace, the unfamous father of evolution

The Ulas mother and father had a staggering 18 children. However, of these, only six were born with quadrupedalism (walking on all fours), which has never been seen before in modern adult humans.

“I never expected that even under the most extraordinary scientific fantasy that modern human beings could return to an animal state,” Prof. Humphrey told 60 Minutes Australia, which made a documentary about the family back in 2018.

“The 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,” he added. More

• Family that walk on all fours have 'undone the last three million years of evolution' (msn.com)
• Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly, Aug. 27, 2024; Harriet Brewis, Indy 100, 8/27/24; Wisdom Quarterly