Posted on 01/30/2006 3:02:26 AM PST by Pharmboy
Earwax may not play a prominent part in human history but at least a small role for it has now been found by a team of Japanese researchers.
Earwax comes in two types, wet and dry. The wet form predominates in Africa and Europe, where 97 percent or more of people have it, and the dry form among East Asians. The populations of South and Central Asia are roughly half and half. By comparing the DNA of Japanese with each type, the researchers were able to identify the gene that controls which type a person has, they report in today's issue of Nature Genetics.
snip
The dry form is quite common in Native Americans, confirming other genetic evidence that their ancestors migrated across the Bering Strait from Siberia 15,000 years ago.
snip
But earwax seems to have the very humble role of being no more than biological flypaper, preventing dust and insects from entering the ear. Since it seems unlikely that having wet or dry earwax could have made much difference to an individual's fitness, the earwax gene may have some other, more important function. Dr. Yoshiura and his colleagues suggest that the gene would have been favored because of its role in sweating.
They write that earwax type and armpit odor are correlated, since populations with dry earwax, such as those of East Asia, tend to sweat less and have little or no body odor, while the wet earwax populations of Africa and Europe sweat more and so may have more body odor. Several Asian features, like small nostrils, are conjectured to be adaptations to the cold. Less sweating, the Japanese authors suggest, may be another adaptation to the cold in which the ancestors of East Asian peoples are thought to have lived.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Note to self: Read the whole sentence before starting to wonder if cleaning one's ears could eliminate the need to wear glasses. :=)
And they taste like chicken.
If a family named Johnson has ear wax could they be sued if they called it Johnson's Wax?
And they taste like chicken.
"Tommy, can you hear me?"
Missed your post...
I'm only on post 18 and I've already learned more than I really care to know about ear wax!
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