Vestiges
- marketingc8
- May 1
- 2 min read
The word “vestige” means a trace, mark, or visible sign left by something that has disappeared or is disappearing. The word comes from the Latin word “vistigium” meaning footprint or track.
When it comes to human anatomy, we are carrying around many vestiges of our evolutionary past. Our bodies are proof of who we were, as animals, before today.
Pretty cool, right?
Aristotle noted the vestigial eyes of moles. The tiny creatures could hardly see, after all, so why did they still have eyes? That was 4th Century BC, so keen observers have been noting the ability of organisms to adapt, change, evolve for a long time—even if they didn’t call it evolution.
In 1798, a French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire noted that nature never works in rapid jumps and “she always leaves vestiges of an organ, even though it is completely superfluous.” (Thumbs-up on the use of the feminine pronoun there, 227 years ago.)
And a colleague of Saint-Hilaire’s, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, identified vestigial structures in his 1809 book Philosophie Zoologique. (Thanks to Wikipedia for this.)
And then along came Robert Wiedersheim. He was a very focused and hard-working German anatomist. We know that’s the case because he spent forty years collaborating on a book about the anatomy of the frog. Yes, forty years. And in 1893, he published The Structure of Man: An Index to His Past History. Wiedersheim knew he wasn’t a pioneer. He credited English biologist Thomas Huxley for his work as well.
Also, a guy named Charles Darwin had already noted the concept of “rudimentary” organs in The Descent of Man but his list included structures that are known now to be essential. Turns out it’s a bit of a gray area. Even Wiedersheim said his list included vestigial organs that were “wholly or in part functionless."
How many vestigial human body parts are there? A zoologist testifying in the famous Scopes Trial wrote in a statement that there are no less than 180—“sufficient to make of man a veritable walking museum of antiquities.”
Examples abound.
The muscles that wiggle our ears, no longer all that necessary for rotating our ears to pick up sounds around us. Some of us, don’t have these muscles and can’t perform the movement.
Wisdom teeth—no longer needed to grind food. Now we’re eating more vegetables and we’re more omnivorous. Our molars have been shoved to the back of our mouths, and they get all squished together in our jaws, increasingly irrelevant.
And the coccyx—a remnant from the days when our predecessors had tails.
So, as we all know, we all continue to evolve?
What body part will be placed on the list next?
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