Researchers at Pepperdine University published a study discussing the evolution of nipples to stop mammals from excreting continuous amounts of milk from their chests.
“According to our findings, mammals steadily developed the nipple over the course of 10,000 generations in order to serve as a sort of end cap on the ceaseless high-pressure stream of warm milk they would otherwise have emitted,” head researcher Dr. Christian Lemaire said.
Lemaire suspected that the milk serves as a deterrent to lactose-intolerant predators, and it also functions as a method of washing away topsoil to acquire deep-growing tubers and burrowing prey, according to Science.
“There is a real evolutionary advantage to controlling one’s steaming milk torrents; for example, the amount of food early man had to consume to keep up with milk production was simply exorbitant,” he explained. “We’re also fairly certain that the development of agriculture was significantly delayed due to mass erosion as millions of hectares of topsoil succumbed to the sheer concussive force of human milk.”
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