Over time, the human skeleton is changing in surprising ways.
It all started with the story of an unlucky goat in the Netherlands in the spring of 1939. His condition was not very good, the left side of his body was a patch of bare hair that should have been on his front leg. On the right, the front leg is deformed, like a tree stump with hooves attached.
Walking on all fours is really a problem for me.
At three months old, the disabled goat was adopted by a veterinary institute and moved to a pasture. There, the desire to run helped the goat quickly develop its unique way of moving: Standing half-up on its hind legs and jumping. He looks like a kangaroo with a hare hybrid.
Unfortunately, the goat had an accident shortly after its first birthday and died. Inside the uncle’s skeleton, scientists discovered something that surprised everyone at that time.
For centuries, researchers thought that bones, including those of humans, were fixed. They develop in a predictable way through the genetic makeup of their parents.
But when a Dutch anatomist examined the goat’s skeleton, he found that it was beginning to adapt to its environment. The hip and leg bones are thicker, while the ankle bones are elongated. Toes and hips are protruding, suitable for an upright position. Skeletons are also beginning to look like animals that move by jumping toads.
Today, we know the human skeleton is malleable. Fossils on display in museums may seem hard and inert, but the bones inside our bodies are full of life with their pink color and surrounding blood vessels, constantly breaking and regenerating. So, even though the skeleton of each person develops according to the information set in DNA, it is also adapted to our daily activities.
Although the skeleton develops according to the information contained in the DNA, it is also adapted to daily activities. (Photo: BBC).
This led to the birth of a discipline called “osteobiography” – recording the process of bone changes, looking at a person’s skeleton to find out how that person lived. For example, early humans certainly walked on two legs because their hip bones were already quite strong.
An interesting example for osteobiography is the mystery of “The Man on Tinian Island” . It is a giant skeleton discovered in 1924 on the island of Tinian, 2,560km east of the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean. The remains, dating from the 16th or 17th century, are in very good condition. The bones of his skull, arm bones, collarbone and leg bones show that he is very strong and of an unusual height.
Research has finally shown that there really is an ancient giant that rules the place, someone who can transcend the physical limits of the body. Archaeologists call him Taotao Tagga – “man of Tagga” – based on the legend of the patriarch Taga, who possessed superhuman strength.
Taga is buried among 12 majestic carved stone pillars that were originally his home. A close examination of the bones of Taga and other giants revealed that they had similar features to those found on the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean, where the islanders regularly transported rocks. heavy.
Taga is buried among 12 majestic carved stone pillars that were originally his home. (Photo: BBC).
The largest house on the island has pillars 5m high, weighing nearly 13 tons, equivalent to two adult African elephants. No need to go to the gym like people today, the Taga patriarch and the men on the island have transported the stone blocks by their own power, for generations.
If in the future this technique is used to record how we live in 2019, scientists will also find characteristic changes in the skeleton that reflect the lifestyles of people today. From the spikes growing behind the skull bones, to the increasingly small jaws going to children in Germany with small elbows, it’s all living proof that modern life is affecting our skeletons.
“I’ve been a clinician for the past 20 years. It’s only been in the last decade or so that I started seeing my patients have this growth on the skull,” said David Shahar, a health researcher at the University of California. School of The Sunshine Coast, Australia said.
The feature Shahar is talking about is like a spike, protruding from the occipital bone (a skull bone that covers the occipital lobe of the brain), found in the lower part of the skull, just above the neck. If you have it, you can feel it with your fingers, right where the spine joins the base of the skull. Scientists call this “external occipital protuberance”.
First discovered in 1885, the famous French scientist Paul Broca didn’t even know what to call this “tail” . Broca had studied many skull samples in his life, but seeing the “tail” behind the skull for the first time left him confused.
The bony part is called the “external occipital protuberance”. (Photo: Radiopaedia).
As for Shahar and his team, they decided to delve into research. He and his students analyzed over a thousand X-ray images of the skulls of people aged 18-86 years old. They re-measured any spiked bone samples and recorded each participant’s posture.
What the scientists found was surprising. This growing bone is more common than expected, especially in young people. One in four people aged 18-30 have this bone.
Shahar suspects the cause is the influence of modern technology, specifically the use of smartphones and tablets. When we hunch our backs, we pull our necks forward, pulling our heads, which on average weigh about 4.5 kg – about the same size as a large watermelon.
When sitting upright, the heavy head is balanced with the spine. But when we lean forward to watch a video of a dog on social media, the neck has to stretch to keep them in place.
Doctors call this text neck . Shahar believes that poor posture puts extra pressure on the neck muscles, which our body responds by creating new bone. It helps the neck muscles that attach to the skull to withstand the extra pressure.
Of course, bad posture is not unique to the 21st century. Every era has something that forces us to hunch our backs. So why can’t we find a record of this extra bone?
Part of that may be due to the time difference for each habit in each era . For example, in 1973, before cell phones were invented, the average American spent about two hours a day reading. While today, they spend almost twice that time using smartphones.
Indeed, Shahar was quite surprised by the size of these spikes. Previously, the most recent study on this issue was conducted at an orthopedic laboratory in India in 2012.
Today, Americans spend almost twice as much time as they did reading in 1973 using their smartphones. (Photo: BBC).
It’s a bone lab and they have quite a few skulls, but the doctor there only found one person with this growing bone. It is about 8mm, very small, not even included in the results of the study by Shahar. As of 2019, the most significant bone can be up to 30 mm long.
Interestingly, men in the Mariana Islands also have a skull that tends to grow more. They are thought to have evolved for a similar reason: Supporting their neck and shoulder muscles to carry heavy loads.
Shahar thinks these thorns will never go away. They will continue to get bigger and longer. “ Imagine the formation of stalactites. If no one interferes, they will continue to grow.” Assuming they go away, there could be another compensation created by our bodies.
In Germany, scientists discovered another strange development : Children’s elbows are shrinking. Christiane Scheffler, an anthropologist from the University of Potsdam, made this discovery while studying body measurements taken from school children.
To see exactly how bone structure has changed over time, Scheffler conducted a study of children’s bone size from 1999-2009. She compared height to elbow width, comparing the results with children over 10 years old and adults. Christiane found that children’s skeletons are getting “thinner” with each passing year.
“We thought a lot, what could be the reason?” Scheffler asked the question. The first idea might be genetic, but it’s hard to change people’s DNA in just 10 years. Second, not eating enough is certainly not a problem in Germany. Third, this is a sedentary generation.
Every time a person moves, the bones add mass to support. (Photo: BBC).
Scheffler decided to do a new study. She asked the participating children to fill out a questionnaire about their daily habits and wear a pedometer for a week. The team found a strong link between the size of the bones and the length of time their limbs were active.
We have known for a long time that every time we move, our bones add mass to support them. “If you use your muscles a lot, they create more bone tissue, the bone becomes thicker and the bone diameter becomes larger,” says Scheffler. The slender bones of children are inherently an adaptation to modern life. It doesn’t make sense for bones to grow without you needing them.
But the most surprising thing is this: Walking is the only exercise that works the bones. “Other exercises don’t work,” says Scheffler, because even the most avid sports fans actually spend very little time exercising.
This means you won’t get much results if you hit the gym a few times a week without walking. “Evolution has taught us to walk nearly 30km a day,” says Scheffler.
The ultimate surprise lurking in our bones has been going on for hundreds of years, but has only been noticed recently. In 2011, Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, an anthropologist from New York University was studying skulls. She wanted to find out if it was possible to tell where a person came from just by looking at the shape of the skull.
In his quest for answers, Cramon-Taubadel scoured museum collections around the world for meticulous comparisons and measurements. The results show that you can actually trace a person’s origins to their “head”. But there is one exception that is not genetically affected, and that is the jawbone.
The shape of the jaw only indicates that the person grew up in a hunter-gatherer society or a society based on agriculture. Cramon-Taubadel suggests this is down to how much we chew as we get older.
“It suggests orthodontic procedures should be done in teenagers because their bones are still growing,” she says. ” Bones are malleable at that age and they will withstand different stresses.”
When the agricultural civilization began, the food was softer and more delicious, we could enjoy the meal gently without the need to tear it up like before. Less chewing makes our muscles weaker, our jaws don’t grow anymore.
“Also, changes in this day and age make us more likely to get dental problems like crooked or crooked teeth,” she says. According to the BBC, a study once showed that the right diet is helpful in developing children’s teeth.
Less chewing makes our muscles weaker, our jaws don’t grow anymore. (Photo: BBC).
However, the development of the modern jawbone also has positive aspects. Since the Stone Age 12,000 years ago, changes in chewing have allowed people to pronounce new sounds like “F” and “V”. Before, these sounds made up only 3% of the language, but now they are present in 76% of words.
Most people today have the upper jaw protruding slightly from the lower jaw. But 12,000 years ago, when the human jaws were biting down to coincide (the tops of the front teeth touched each other), the pronunciation of words with “V” and “F” sounds, for example, “heavy” , “fun” will be very difficult.
Imagine, if in the future, an archaeologist from space landed on Earth and found our skeleton, what would they think? Right now, people with unhealthy diets, inactivity, habitual technology addiction, the best way to do it is to cremate them all, leaving no evidence that a generation once “bowed”. head” how much.