My guess it’s even older than that. My bullshitspiration is that peristalsis enabled more complex digestion when our quadruped ancestors needed more nutrition options.
Comment on Space Honey
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Right, why do we have that redundant swallowing mechanism? Did enough people choke while eating upside down to make a difference? Wait, this is from our ape-y ancestry?
JayleneSlide@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Zron@lemmy.world 4 days ago
How about the fact that being a qaudruped is basically the body plan for mammals. Humans are the weird ones for standing upright and having our mouths be directly above our stomachs. Every other mammal has their stomach mostly parallel with the mouth while standing. In order for food to get to the stomach, you’d need some force moving the food sideways towards the stomach.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 4 days ago
Probably also helps with eating while lying down.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Most water back in the day was at ground level, so if we could only rely on gravity we’d have had a hell of a time bending down to slurp it up.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Oh, right, that’s a thing.