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October 2, 2019 12:20 pm

Human Babies In the Womb Have Lizard-Like Hand Muscles

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Babies in the womb have extra lizard-like muscles in their hands that most will lose before they are born, medical scans reveal. They are probably one of the oldest, albeit fleeting, remnants of evolution seen in humans yet, biologists say, in the journal Development. They date them as 250 million years old -- a relic from when reptiles transitioned to mammals. It is unclear why the human body makes and then deletes them before birth. The biologists say the developmental step may be what makes thumbs dextrous. Thumbs, unlike other digits, retain an extra muscle. The biologists are planning more work looking at other parts of the human body in detail. They have already studied the feet and know extra muscles develop and disappear there too while babies grow in the womb. Monkeys and apes still have these muscles and use them to climb and manipulate objects with their feet. Lead author Dr Rui Diogo, from the Howard University, said: "Some of the things we are losing, it's not that we are getting better humans and more progress. No. We are really losing things that will make super-humans. "Super-humans would be keeping those muscles because you would be able to move all your digits, including your feet, as thumbs. "We lost them because we do not need them." Dr Sergio Almecija, an anthropologist who studies ape and human evolution, at the American Museum of Natural History, said the findings provided a deeper appreciation of human development but raised many questions. "The novelty of this study is that it allows us to visualize -- with precision -- when exactly during our development some structures appear and/or disappear," he said. "The important question for me now is, 'What else are we missing? What will we find when all the human body is inspected at this detail during its development?" 'What is causing certain structure to disappear and then to appear again? We can now see how it happens but what about the why?"

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