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A Twitter thread on evolutionary leftovers in the human body has gone viral, largely due to how freaking interesting it is.
Human bodies are littered with bits and pieces we don't really need anymore. We don't have tails, but we still have a tailbone. Goosebumps originated to plump up our animal ancestors' hair to make them appear larger and scare off predators, not something we do much of these days. Wisdom teeth used to help us grind down plant tissue, now they just pop up in our twenties to cause us intense pain before promptly being removed.
They are all little bits of evidence of evolution you can see in your own body.
In a viral thread on Twitter, evolutionary anthropologist Dorsa Amir explained some of the cooler evolutionary leftovers that there's a good chance you still have.
"These are just a few pieces of evolutionary baggage handed down to you from your primate ancestors, among others," she wrote. "Your body is basically a natural history museum!"
One of the easiest to see of these is the palmaris longus. As one Twitter user delicately put it: "I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT WAS JUST SOME HUGE ASS BEEFY VEIN"
Another quite visible leftover is on many of our ears.
The feature was first described by Charles Darwin at the beginning of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, as evidence of our common ancestry among primates.
One feature everybody wants back is the sideways blink.
Although when you see what that would actually look like you may want to think again.
If you have a baby, you're probably well aware of this next leftover, from when our ancestors used to cling to their parents from birth.
Something that's been blowing a lot of peoples' minds is that goosebumps are vestigial, and that some people can cause goosebumps at will.
There are many other cool things in the Twitter thread, including why males have nipples, wisdom teeth, and your tail bone. It's well worth checking out the full thread, which starts here.
