THE NECK

A sidelong look at an evolutionary adaptation that really shouldn’t work—but does.

It’s not just gruesomeness—though there’s a hint of that—that prompts anatomist and artist Dunlap to begin his narrative with dancer Isadora Duncan, who snapped her famously long neck when her scarf got caught in a car wheel, her life “finished off at [an] expressive but vulnerable constriction.” Everything about the neck screams vulnerability: Its vital blood vessels are close to the surface, easily sliced; its bones are fragile, easily snapped; its tubes are “easy to clog or puncture”; on top of that, our necks are so narrow that we can choke or drown in an instant. Necks, Dunlap notes, are perhaps not strictly necessary, and not every creature has one; still, emerging about 375 million years ago, the neck is what allowed human beings to form language (by accommodating the larynx) and to become upright and bipedal (by holding our heads up), the better to see long distances with. Why, then, don’t we have giraffelike necks to see even farther with and gather food below? Because, Dunlap observes, “we are liberated from the necessity of a long neck to reach the ground because we generally grasp objects with our hands rather than our jaws.” Of course, getting around requires our heads to rattle around quite a bit atop our heads, and then when we sleep, so many of us suffer apnea, “a nearly unique human phenomenon.” (A couple of flat-faced dog species suffer from it, too.) If there’s a note to be made about the neck, Dunlap’s got it, from the fragility of vase necks to the interesting thought that a turtle’s slowly head-withdrawing neck is, in some species, retooled so that it’s a lightning-fast forward-thrusting thing, the better to prey with.

A novel blend of history, art, and science that tells readers everything they’ll ever need to know about a crucial body part.