A new knee ligament? How did we miss that?
So how long have our knees been around? As far as I can tell, a very VERY long time. The oldest homo erectus we’ve found is 1.9 million years old, but that’s just the oldest one we’ve found. Our knees were a bit different than his, but the point is, we’ve been looking at knees for awhile. So why did it take so long to discover a new ligament?
I don’t know, and neither do the people who discovered it. But what’s great is, is that through all of this time staring at the human anatomy. Just when we think we’ve explored every nook and cranny of this amazing body we are in charge of—BOOM! There’s something pretty important we haven’t seen before.
It’s not some obscure enzymatic process, or impossible to monitor brain chemistry. It’s not something beyond the reaches of Pluto. It’s not new crime fighting antibodies. It’s a freakin’ ligament. And it’s not particularly buried either. It’s called the anterolateral ligament or ALL for short. It’s a knee stabilizer. And it was discovered by knee surgeons from the University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium.
Here’s the NYT article: Click Here
I think that the important thing to learn from the discovery isn’t the fact that soon there will be ALL tear treatments or whatever. But the fact that there was a discovery. After looking at the knee for all of these years , a few smart people saw something new.
What else have we not seen that’s right under our nose?