FOAB Information

Tuesday, 25 November 2025

Evolutionary Waste

Modern day Humans are the product of thousands of years of evolution so it's no surprise that sometimes we come with a few spare parts which are left overs from our earlier incarnations so what remnants of ancient ancestors have we still got that we don't need and what where they for anyway?  
The Appendix is a small pouch attached to the large intestine which in our early incantation helped digest tough plant matter and acted as a reservoir for beneficial gut bacteria but now the only thing is does is sometimes explode and get hastily removed.
The Coccyx is also sometimes called the Tailbone which is exactly what it is, the remnant of vertebrae that once formed a tail in our mammalian ancestors to hep balance while swinging about tree branched but since we learnt to walk upright, it's just something whose only use is to be difficult to spell and make Microsoft Word underline it when you write about how we don't need it but are stuck with it.
Wisdom Teeth were useful to our larger jawed forefathers as they were ideal for grinding down a tough raw diet of plants and meat but as we now cook and soften our food, our jaws have shrunk but the Wisdom teeth didn't get the memo and still turn up and sometimes have to be surgically removal.
We have have lost most of our body hair but the Arrector Pili Muscles are still inside the hair follicles and where they were once great for contracting and making us appear larger to whatever wanted to eat us for lunch, now when they contract they just give us goosebumps when we are frightened or cold which is a pretty naff thing to have as we already know and dont need our non-existent hair to tell us.  
The Auricular Muscles allowed our earliest ancestors to move their ears to better pinpoint sounds like a dog or cat but since evolution gave us the ability to turn our heads, they just sit there giving some people the ability to wiggle their ears which is a pretty cool party trick to be fair.
In the forearm is the Palmaris Longus Muscle which helped ancestral primates to climb trees and grip branches but since a massive meteor wiped out the dinosaurs and we could come down from the trees without getting trodden on by a Woolly Mammoth, no use but still it remains as a handy source for tendon grafts in surgery apparently.
Back in the day when we were somewhere between being ex-fish and wannabe apes, we had a third eyelid called the Plica Semilunaris which slid across the eye for protection and moisture and though many animals such as birds and reptiles still have them, we have regular eyelids and tears so don't need it so it has shrivelled to that small fold of tissue in the inner corner of the eye.


No comments:

Post a Comment