eli5 How was a whole organ’s usefulness unknown for such a long time(appendix)?
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Our modern medical understanding is only a century or two old. Your odds of surviving any injury worthy of medical treatment were the same 200 years ago as they were 20000 years ago, for the most part (there’s many valid claims to be made about herbal remedies but we didn’t have a solid grasp on antibiotics until 1928). The exact and precise function of any living tissue is hard to decipher because it is either A alive and part of a being that would prefer you didn’t root around inside it or B dead, much more willing to be poked and prodded but no longer doing the processes it did while alive. So figuring out specifically what one auxillary organ does is just hard. And there’s other bigger, more relevant organs to figure out first.
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