I broke its neck.
When making a vase on the potter’s wheel, I torqued its slippery neck clear off the pot as I attempted to skinny it right into a sleek curve.
I discover vases gratifying to make and their shapes particularly pleasing to the attention. However vases additionally should be dealt with with specific care as a result of one a part of their “physique” – the neck – is usually so slender that it may be simply damaged.
That day on the wheel, I spotted that it was not in contrast to the human neck. Although solely a small portion of the human physique – about 1% by surface area – our necks have an outsize affect on our psyche and tradition.
From selfies to formal portraits, the neck positions the pinnacle in expressive poses. The neck’s vocal cords vibrate to make meaningful words and shifting songs. We passionately kiss it and spritz it with alluring fragrance. We use it to nod our head in settlement, tilt our head in confusion and bow our head in prayer.
Ornaments similar to necklaces can categorical trend sense in addition to sign wealth and standing. Collars can accent the face in portraits in addition to denote occupational class, blue collar versus white collar.
But, for all its aesthetic and expressive efficiency, the neck can be a website of worry and deep vulnerability. Villains and vampires zero in on the neck. Anxious days at work make us clench our neck muscular tissues till they ache. A nice meal will be jolted into terror if a morsel slips into the improper tube within the neck, sending us right into a coughing match.
For millennia, individuals in energy have oppressed their topics by exploiting the narrowness and fragility of the neck – a darkish historical past of dominating and terrorizing each other utilizing shackles, nooses and guillotines. The broadly circulated video of George Floyd’s homicide was a brutal reminder that violent asphyxiation is hardly confined to the distant past.
As I turned conscious of the importance of the neck in tradition, I started to discover how these two attributes – its expressive vitality and unnerving vulnerability – might coexist and be concentrated so intensely in a single small area of the physique. Finally, it became a book.
I am foremost a biologist, and in writing my guide, I got here to see that the neck’s vitality and vulnerability are rooted in its biology: The neck performs an particularly vast number of essential capabilities, and it’s the product of a unusual evolutionary historical past.
The neck does so many issues, all on the similar time. For instance, it transports over 2,000 kilos (907 kilograms) of blood, air and meals between the pinnacle and the torso each single day. It strikes the pinnacle each six seconds on common to direct our visible consideration. Its vocal cords vibrate hundreds of times per second with each spoken phrase.
However this multifunctionality, this vitality, is feasible solely due to its vulnerability. To be cellular and versatile, the neck should be slender, and so it’s simply strained. Its essential transport tubes – the windpipe, esophagus and blood vessels – should even be skinny and close to the floor, making them simply punctured and compressed.
From water to land
Our vertebrate ancestors “invented” this peculiar contraption as they advanced from water to land.
Our fish ancestors had no neck as a result of they needed a single rigid axis to move efficiently through water. Since shifting round on land didn’t require a stiff spinal column, early terrestrial vertebrates evolved flexibility just behind the head, enabling them to broadly scan the setting and to direct their mouths towards prey with out shifting their complete our bodies. Image a zebra swinging its head facet to facet surveying the savanna for predators, or a lizard tilting its head down and to the facet to snap up a crawling bug.
Early land vertebrates also evolved lungs, and this transformation freed up the gill buildings that fish used for respiratory to evolve into numerous helpful – and typically problematic – neck buildings, such because the voice field, tonsils and the little flap that separates the windpipe and esophagus.
This repurposing of scraps left over from the gills of our distant ancestors contributed to the varied capacities of our neck. However as merchandise of a unusual evolutionary “renovation,” people and different land vertebrates dwell with a jerry-rigged design that fates us to hold many collateral vulnerabilities on the neck.
The peculiar human neck
Whereas the human neck retains the essential design of our ancestors, it’s nonetheless fairly uncommon amongst vertebrates.
Most land vertebrates elevate their our bodies on 4 legs, so their necks should be lengthy sufficient to decrease their heads to the bottom to feed and robust sufficient to lift it up excessive to go searching. Once more, consider a zebra feeding on the savanna.
As a result of people stroll on two legs, we stability our head atop our backbone. Since we use our arms to seize our meals, we don’t want sturdy neck muscular tissues to maneuver the pinnacle round. So, in contrast with most mammals our dimension, our necks are comparatively weak, making them extra liable to pressure and damage.
As one other milestone in human evolution, the voice box migrated to a relatively low position in the neck, and this uncommon placement contributes to our capability to make an particularly broad vary of vocal sounds that we use for speech. Nonetheless, this descent of the voice field throughout the throat additionally makes us more susceptible to choking and sleep apnea.
The neck epitomizes the twin nature of the human situation, the methods wherein magnificence and frailty are sometimes entwined, two sides of the identical coin in our biology, in {our relationships} – and, sure, even in ceramic vases.
Kent Dunlap is a professor of biology at Trinity College.
This text is republished from The Conversation beneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the original article.
