The human body is a unique machine that evolution has been constructing for hundreds of thousands of years. Here’s what came out of it: we’ve collected the strangest facts about our body.
Babies don’t have kneecaps.
Yes, people are born without knees. The kneecaps of newborns are made of cartilage, which gradually “matures” and turns into bone by the time they are six months old. Nature supposedly came up with this trick to make it easier for the baby to pass through the birth canal.
Over the course of a lifetime, a person secretes enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.
We secrete about 1-2.5 liters of saliva per day, so with an average lifespan of 75 years, that’s a total of 25-50 thousand. This would be enough to fill two swimming pools or, for example, water ten acres of potato field (it’s better not to imagine this, of course). It’s curious that during sleep, the secretion of saliva almost completely stops.
In 10 years you will have a completely new skeleton.
Bone tissue is completely renewed in ten years, that is, some people change their skeleton more often than their job. After forty years, this process slows down, since regeneration takes longer for the body. The most unpleasant thing is that bones lose their former strength, and the risk of developing osteoporosis increases many times over.
When a person loses a little finger, they lose half of their hand strength.
Losing the little finger results in a loss of 50 percent of the strength of the entire hand. The fact is that the little finger plays a decisive role in squeezing it: it supports the weakest finger, the ring finger. If you put your hand on the table with your palm down and start raising your fingers one by one, the ring finger will hardly rise without the little finger. That is, with the loss of the little finger, a person loses not one, but two fingers.
A human has as much hair as a chimpanzee
“A little more beautiful than a monkey” is not a hoary joke, but a harsh truth about our biological species. On every square centimeter of human skin there are from 250 to 500 hair follicles, and in this we are not far removed from primates. The difference is that the hairs on the human body are thinner and lighter. Anthropologists attribute this to the fact that when our ancestors began to hunt in the savannas of Africa, warm wool became a burden for us – and people “got rid of” it.
The brain controls the body, making it weaker
The human body is much stronger than we think. Our muscles can withstand incredible loads that are unsafe for the body as a whole: if you strain yourself to the fullest, you can easily break bones. That is why our brain constantly keeps muscles in a relaxed state. The exception is stressful situations when people break the ropes that bind them and lift the weight of a car.