The human appendix is a vestigal part of the large intestine, but what exactly was it’s function? I have heard recently that it aided in the digestion of raw meat. After man discovered fire and cooked meat, the appendix became useless in the human digestive system. Are there any theories as to how the appendix aided in the digestion of uncooked meat? And why just uncooked meat? Isn’t there any other foods that are difficult to digest that the appendix could have been useful for?
According to Scientific American, it still has a function.
The function of the appendix is to kill you.
Thanks for the informative link, Pipeliner. I certainly was intrigued by these new theories. BTW, in your link it stated the following:
There had been little prior evidence of this or any other role of the appendix in animal research, because the appendix does not exist in domestic mammals.
What other species have an appendix (or anything close to it)? I thought it was unique to humans.
Enola, me specifically, or people in general?
According to Discovery.com, “the higher apes, some rodents, and various other animals” have vermiform appendices.
The appendix (ceacum) in other animals is used to allow microbial fermentation to digest the indigestible. Basically food gets shunted into the appendix, which is just a blind sack off the gut, and the microbes in there cause the food to rot. The rotten material and the microbes themselves are squeezed out under pressure and further digested and absoprbed by the gut. Some herbivores have riduculously long appendxes (appendices?) with the koalas coming in at something like 9 feet. In human ancestors the appendix was probably important after we switched from our basically frugivorous rainforest diet to the more stachy root, grain and tuber diet of the savannas. Apes aren’t real good at digesting starch without fermenting it or cooking it.
The raw meat thing sounds like a crock to me. Filling an appendix with raw flesh and leaving it to rot under anaerobic conditions seems like a great way to get some really nasty diseases like botulism. Carnivores tend to have very short digestive tracts with rapid throughput to prevent food from fermenting. I’ve certainly never heard of any that find it necessary to ferment their food to digest it. Aside from that animal protein tends to be among the easist foods to digest and wouldn’t require the evolution of an appendix. It would be far faster and easier evolutionari;y to simply up the production of proteases in the gut the way other carnivores do.