This tribe looks much the same as the others in the neighborhood. Its members are short in stature, their skin is very dark, and their facial features immediately identify them as African.
And yet one feature distinguishes the people of the tribe in question from all others.Their strange feet are shocking to those who first encounter this tribe. The middle toes are missing altogether, and the thumb and little finger have been altered so that the foot looks like a claw.
The limbs of these people resemble the legs of ostriches, and they are called ostrich people, in the local dialect, sapadi.
Reality or hoax? Information about people with two toes has long appeared, but it was not taken seriously. The first mentions of the strange tribe date back to ancient times. In the writings of the ancient Greeks met the name Apistodactyls. Modern science took such evidence as a figment of the imagination of ancient writers, who intertwined facts with fiction.
In the 19th century, the American traveler Paul de Chaillou visited Central Africa and wrote a book about it. Among the many interesting facts about this continent was the mention of a tribe of people with two toes. He wrote that they were noted for their agility and quickness.The traveler’s book was read by a narrow circle of people, and information about the two-toed Africans remained hidden for the time being. Only after a hundred years later, the Englishman Buster Phillips told about the strange tribe he met in Zimbabwe, the two-fingered spoke to the world.
An ethnographer in the city of Feira encountered people in trees who were jumping from one branch to another. When he approached them, the scientist frightened the natives away, but he saw their footprints in the sand.
They looked as if they had been left by ostriches. The ethnographer wrote about it in a magazine. After the news was published, finally the world became interested in the tribe of two-fingered people.Photographs made by the hunters began to appear in the press. But even this could not convince scientists of the existence of unusual people. In the early 1970s a special expedition went to Central Africa.
Sorcerers and healers
Representatives of neighboring tribes helped establish contact between the expedition and the Sapadi tribe. The two-fingered people are not only dexterous, they understand the properties of herbs and perform operations almost without tools.
They are considered sorcerers, but tinctures made by the Sapadi are taken to cure ailments. The tribe has its own rituals that are incomprehensible to other tribes.It turned out that not all members of the tribe have two toes. One in four of them has this anomaly, and the middle toes are there, but they are underdeveloped. The reason for the mutation can only be found out by performing DNA tests.
It’s all about genetics
Scientists took up the study of the genes that cause the claw. It turned out to be dominant. If one of the parents has it, the child will be born with two toes. The presumed reason that only members of the Sapadi tribe have such an abnormality is because of closely related marriages. Health does not suffer from such a peculiarity. Later it was discovered that similar tribes are found in other areas, for example, in Botswana and Zambia.