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People have speculated over the nature of seemingly useless physical characteristics in living things for thousands of years. It wasn’t until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, though, that the idea of vestigiality would enter the public imagination via the writings of a couple of French naturalists and pre-emptive Darwinists, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaireand Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin would, of course, go on to redefine the field of human biology some half-century later with On the Origin of Species, but it was his second book, 1871’s The Descent of Man, where he listed a number of the structures we know today as vestigial for the first time, among them the appendix, tail bone, and wisdom teeth.
View the original article here: 6 Surprising Examples of Human Vestigiality
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