At some point during our development in the womb we’ve all had tails. They’re usually about one sixth the length our tiny embryonic bodies. But for most of us, these elongations of the coccyx bone at the base of the spine go away before we enter the world. For the others, well, their vestigial tails get written up in medical books and articles. Here are just a few stories:
New York Tribune, October 18, 1885
“There was a widely accepted legend to the effect that all Cornishmen had tails. A similar legend is related by Polydore Vergil of Kentish men. According to that trustworthy chronicler, some of these people insulted St. Thomas a Becket by cutting off the tail of his horse, and as a fitting punishment for the sacrilege all the children born to them were tailed.”
A human tail, from Popular Science Monthly, 1892.
Popular Science Monthly, 1892
“Well-authenticated instances of human tails are that of a Moi boy, twelve years old, who was found a few years ago in Cochin-China, and had a tail about a foot long—simply a mass of flesh—containing no bony frame; and the case communicated to the Berlin Anthropological Society in July, 1890, by the Dutch resident at Ternate, of two natives of New Guinea, who had come on board his steamer in Geelvink Bay, in 1880—adult male Papuans, in good health and spirits, well shaped and muscular, who had coccygeal bones projecting four centimeters, or an inch and a half in length. Dr. O.W. Holmes says, in the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1890, that Dr. Priestley, of London, showed him, at the Medical Congress in Washington, a photograph of a boy who had ‘a very respectable tail.'”
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, 1896
“A certain Wesleyan missionary, George Brown, in 1876 spoke of a formal breeding of a tailed race in Kali, off the coast of New Britain. Tailless children were slain at once, as they would be exposed to public ridicule. The tailed men of Borneo are people afflicted with hereditary malformation analogous to sexdigitism. A tailed race of princes have ruled Rajoopootana, and are fond of their ancestral mark. There are fabulous stories told of canoes in the East Indies which have holes in their benches made for the tails of the rowers. At one time in the East the presence of tails was taken as a sign of brute force.”
“… Miller tells of a West Point student who had an elongation of the coccyx, forming a protuberance which bulged very visibly under the skin. Exercise at the riding school always gave him great distress, and the protuberance would often chafe until the skin was broken, the blood trickling into his boots.”
In 1922, a case of a human tail bolstered the case for evolution.
Richmond-Times Dispatch, May 28, 1922
“Just at the height of the latest controversy over man’s descent from the ape—with William Jennings Bryan, Bernard Shaw and the Kentucky Legislature all attacking Darwin—scientists have come forward with an amazing new piece of evidence in support of evolution—
A man with a tail!
A real, living, human being, like other members of the human race in every respect, except that he has a tail like a monkey!
The man has just been discovered in one of the Philippine Islands, off the coast of Asia.
He is of mixed Asiatic origin—his father a Korean and his mother a Filipino.
Opponents of the theory that man has evolved from the higher apes may contend that this savage with a tail is a chance ‘freak of nature,’ and consequently of no importance as scientific evidence. But the biologists have an annoying habit of presenting facts to back up their beliefs.
‘It is reasonable to regard this peculiarity as a return to an old ancestral condition—as a true reversal to the ancestral type,’ says J.A.S. Watson, author of recent works on evolution.”
Kairpara Gazette, February 20, 1929
“A human tail has just been discovered appended to a baby girl born at Knoxville, in Tennessee. It is seven inches long, and has been removed by an operation. The child is reported to be progressing well. An ironic circumstance is that Tennessee is the state which outlaws the theories of evolution.”
Huffington Post, Aug. 1, 2013
“Ke$ha used to have a tail, and she doesn’t mean one of those animal-print things you clip to the back of your shirt, but an actual bone piece, sticking out of her back, which resembled a tail. She told her tale to Heat: ‘I had a tail when I was born. It was a tiny tail, about a quarter of an inch, then they chopped it off and stole my tail. That was when I was little. I’m really sad about that story.’”
