collect the information about different problems faced by you're body parts
Answers
1. An unsound spine
Problem: Our spines are a mess. It’s a wonder we can even walk, says Bruce Latimer, director of the Center for Human Origins at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. When our ancestors walked on all fours, their spines arched, like a bow, to withstand the weight of the organs suspended below. But then we stood up. That threw the system out of whack by 90 degrees, and the spine was forced to become a column. Next, to allow for bipedalism, it curved forward at the lower back. And to keep the head in balance—so that we didn’t all walk around as if doing the limbo—the upper spine curved in the opposite direction. This change put tremendous pressure on the lower vertebrae, sticking about 80 percent of adults, according to one estimate, with lower back pain.
Fix: Go back to the arch. “Think of your dog,” Latimer says. “From the sacrum to the neck, it’s a single bow curve. That’s a great system.” Simple. Strong. Pain-free. There’s only one catch: To keep the weight of our heads from pitching us forward, we’d need to return to all fours.
2. An inflexible knee
Problem: As Latimer says, “You take the most complex joint in the body and put it between two huge levers—the femur and the tibia—and you’re looking for trouble.” The upshot is your knee only rotates in two directions: forward and back. “That’s why every major sport, except maybe rugby, makes it illegal to clip, or hit an opponent’s knee from the side.”
Fix: Replace this hinge with a ball and socket, like in your shoulders and hips. We never developed this type of joint at the knee “because we didn’t need it,” Latimer says. “We didn’t know about football.”
3. A too-narrow pelvis
Problem: Childbirth hurts. And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman’s pelvis hasn’t changed for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger.
Fix: Sure, you could stretch out the pelvis, Latimer says, but technologists may already be onto a better solution. “I would bet that in 10,000 years, or even in 1,000 years, no woman in the developed world will deliver naturally. A clinic will combine the sperm and egg, and you’ll come by and pick up the kid.”
4. Exposed testicles
Problem: A man’s life-giving organs hang vulnerably outside the body.
Fix: Moving the testicles indoors would save men the pain of getting hit in the nuts. To accomplish this, first you’d need to tweak the sperm, says Gordon Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany. Apparently the testicles (unlike the ovaries) get thrown out in the cold because sperm must be kept at 2.5 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit below the body’s internal temperature. Gallup hypothesizes that these lower temperatures keep sperm relatively inactive until they enter the warm confines of a vagina, at which point they go racing off to fertilize the egg.1 This evolutionary hack prevents sperm from wearing themselves out too early. So change the algorithm, Gallup says. Keep the sperm at body temperature and make the vagina hotter. (And, by the way, there’s no need to draw up new blueprints: Elephants offer a pretty good prototype.)
5. Crowded teeth
Problem: Humans typically have three molars on each side of the upper and lower jaws near the back of the mouth. When our brain drastically expanded in size, the jaw grew wider and shorter, leaving no room for the third, farthest back molars. These cusped grinders may have been useful before we learned to cook and process food. But now the “wisdom teeth” mostly just get painfully impacted in the gums.
Fix: Get rid of them. At one point, they appeared to be on their way out—about 25 percent of people today (most commonly Eskimos) are born without some or all of their third molars. In the meantime, we’ve figured out how to safely extract these teeth with dental tools, which, Mann notes, we probably wouldn’t have invented without the bigger brains. So you could call it a wash.