Your blood is the backbone of your entire body. It helps lubricate everything, it keeps oxygen moving throughout your body, and even as defense mechanisms in place to help you when you’re in trouble.
One of your blood’s most potent defenses is in its ability to congeal. While this could obviously pose some risks in people who have rare congealing blood disorders, where the blood unnaturally coagulates and causes your flow of blood to cease.
But for the overwhelming majority of people on earth, this congealing factor allows your body to ward off injury without bleeding to death.
Blood Coagulation Occurs When You’re Wounded
When you suffer a small to medium sized cut, your body goes to work to make sure your blood just doesn’t come pouring out, otherwise a minor cut could end your life in a matter of minutes.
When you’re cut, your body sends white blood cells to the rescue to clog up the wound to stop your blood from exiting your body. This results in a thickness to your blood around the cut, and is the reason why you’ve survived so many falls off of your bike as a kid.
With this mechanism that was spawned from millions of years of evolution, you wouldn’t be the kind of human that you are today.
But it Wasn’t Always Like that!
Millions of years ago, prehistoric human-beings didn’t have anywhere near the complicated bodies that we have now and take for granted. We even see a lot of leftover things on our bodies that we no longer have use for, such as the spleen, wisdom teeth, and appendix.
We’re not sure what role these organs and teeth played, but it used to be important. Wisdom teeth were most likely necessary for thrashing through larger food items that were more plentiful back then, and we no longer have use for them.
Modern human bodies reject wisdom teeth, as is evident in the immense amount of pain that a lot of people face.
In addition, prehistoric humans didn’t have the ability to congeal blood or fight off infections as well as modern humans. This left many a caveman dead after a day or day due to blood loss and severe infection.
Our Bodies are Awesome
Therefore, because of these awesome attributes, modern humans are really modern marvels. We have amazing immune systems, awesome defense strategies, and plenty of extra body parts that we no longer have any use for.
So the next time you take your body for granted and hate that you’re having a bad hair day, remember that your ancient ancestors didn’t even have half as good as you do!
