A study of their weird evolution
TL;DR – Giraffes have no right to exist.
Slightly long post, this one. So if you don’t want to read the entire post, just watch the video below.
Prologue
These are the closest living relatives to humans.
Pretty close, right?
Gorillas, Bonobos and Chimpanzees share 96%, 98% and 99% of their DNA with Humans respectively.
Now, ‘this’ is the closest living relative to a giraffe.
Its called ‘OKAPI’ and its not very close, I would say.
One of these relationships makes immediate, intuitive sense. The other one, not so much.
And this is not even the strangest part.
Below is a representation of the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve (RLN) and it connects the brain to a small nearby muscle in the throat.
Every mammal has it and its used to control your voice box movements and speech.
In humans, this nerve is about a foot long.
But in a Giraffe, that nerve is FIFTEEN FEET LONG!
It travels all the way down the neck, loops around the heart, and climbs all the way back up.
All that detour, just to cross a few inches.
If someone ‘intelligent’ (you know who) designed this in an engineering school, they’d fail the course.
And yet this animal has been walking the earth for millions of years.
Outlasting creatures like Bramatherium & Sivatherium which were better and smarter.
By every rule of biology, the giraffe should not exist.
And let me tell you why, because the truth is stranger than fiction.
The Impossible Animal
Most of us learned about giraffes in school. Long neck, spots, eats from tall trees. Pretty cool.
But the moment you look at how this animal works, something feels weird.
That extraordinary neck contains exactly seven vertebrae. Same as yours. Same as a mouse. Seven. Just stretched. Enormously.
To pump blood all the way up that neck, the giraffe evolved a blood pressure roughly three times that of a human.
If you had that blood pressure, you’d be dead within minutes.
And when a giraffe bends down to drink water, it has to splay its front legs sideways, lower its entire neck to the ground, and stay in that awkward, vulnerable position for almost a full minute.
Lions know this. They wait for this exact moment.
Oh, and giving birth? The calf drops six feet to the ground, on dirt. That’s your first experience of the world.
And then you have thirty minutes to stand up, because the savanna doesn’t wait for anyone.
This animal is, on paper, a disaster.
But, Why?
Evolution is supposed to be this ruthless optimiser. Survival of the fittest and all.
Every generation, the weak die out, the strong survive, and slowly, over millions of years, you get beautifully adapted creatures.
So why did it produce… this?
THEORY ONE – The classic answer, the one from your school textbook, is that the neck evolved to reach food.
Taller trees, taller giraffes, more food, more survival.
Except giraffes spend most of their time eating at shoulder height. Not treetops. Things any normal-sized animal could reach.
And the Okapi, the giraffe’s closest living relative, has a short neck and does just fine.
So the food theory starts to wobble.
THEORY TWO – Fighting.
Male giraffes swing their necks like sledgehammers at each other.
It’s called necking and it is brutal to watch. Longer neck, more leverage, more mates.
That makes sense. Except female giraffes have long necks too. And they’re not out there brawling.
THEORY THREE – Thermoregulation.
A taller body with a longer neck has more surface area to release heat in a hot climate. Plausible. But the evidence is thin.
Three theories. None of them are fully accepted.
Now this brings me back to that nerve.
Did Evolution Play a Trick?
The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve.
The nerve that exists in every mammal.
The nerve that took a massive detour, just to connect some nearby muscles in the throat to the brain.
Now, for a long time, people pointed to this as proof that evolution is messy. Evidence of poor design.
But, why did this happen?
380 million years ago, in the fish ancestors that we share with giraffes, this nerve worked perfectly.
Back then there was no neck.
The brain, heart and gill muscles sat close together, and the nerve ran a clean, efficient path between them.
Then necks appeared.
Spines elongated.
And in some lineages the nerve couldn’t reroute, but stretched dramatically.
Until you get fifteen feet of nerve doing a two-inch job.
Evolution doesn’t work like a software update.
You can only add to what’s already there. If something doesn’t make sense, it’s still a feature, not a bug.
The giraffe isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s still here, walking even if it shouldn’t.
Because evolution doesn’t reward perfection.
It rewards survival and for some reason or multiple reasons, the Giraffe, through all the three theories mentioned above has been able to survive.
We’re not designed either.
We’re accumulated over millions of years.
Evolution got us here, plain and simple!
And maybe there’s something quietly reassuring in that.
If you liked this post, read my other post on ‘Foods that went Extinct!’