The shape of a person’s neck and jaw can also be a factor. In the mid-1990s, researchers in Japan found that slight changes in the size and position of the pharynx at the back of the throat drastically increased the likelihood that someone would develop a breathing disorder during sleep. Darwin noted “the strange fact that every particle of food and drink we swallow has to pass over the orifice of the trachea with some risk of falling into the lungs.” The longer tissues of the soft palate at the back of the throat made it possible for the airway to become blocked after a routine exhalation, which could start the cycle of sleep apnea. Food could literally go down the wrong pipe, a biological problem unique to modern humans. Those first, complicated sounds uttered by Homo sapiens soon developed into language.īut the positioning of the tongue in the Homo sapiens mouth complicates the acts of eating, drinking, and breathing. With this new hardware, humans were able to move beyond making simple grunts. Homo sapiens differed from Neanderthals by developing a flatter face, a smaller jawbone, and a tongue that descends deeper into the throat than in any other mammal. Plus, with extra room in their mouths, Neanderthals never experienced the pain of impacted wisdom teeth. If you were to look at a Neanderthal’s mouth, you might think that its descendants would have been the ones to survive over the long run, considering their jawbones were larger and stronger than our own. A short tour of fossils illustrates this point.

Its cause could simply be the trade-off that the human body makes for having the ability to speak in a complex language. All told, about 20 million Americans have the disorder. These numbers climb as a person gets older, so that as many as 1 out of 3 elderly men have at least a mild case of sleep apnea. A study in 1994 found that about 10 percent of women and 25 percent of men have difficulties breathing in their sleep.

Dreamland david randall