Bill Gifford
speaker
328 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 22 Mar
Bill Gifford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, so our ability to sweat is this evolutionary anomaly, and it kind of happened by accident, they think, more than a million years ago.
The series of genetic mutations that took these existing sweat glands that our ancestors had in their feet and their, I guess, paws, spread them all over their body.
These are our pre-human ape-like ancestors, right?
So they had these, all of a sudden they had these sweat glands all over their body and they lost their body hair.
So now they could sweat to cool themselves.
And this meant that they could basically kick the butts of every other animal.
They went from the middle of the food chain, started climbing to the top because now, because they could sweat and because we could sweat,
They could function in the middle of the day, in the heat of the day, in Africa, on the equator.
So all the other animals had to kind of hide in the shade, right?
We could be out foraging, even hunting.
We had it to ourselves.
So sweating is our superpower.
So we've been sweating for a million years.
Air conditioning was invented in 1903, and it took decades to catch on.
So even like our grandparents would have endured or not, or endured slash been able to handle 30, 40 degree temperature swings in the course of a day.
especially in North America, heat to cold, right?
So we had this big temperature range and we're evolutionarily equipped to handle it.
But now fast forward to the modern era and we live in 67 degrees, 70, 72, perfect comfort all the time.
I live in Miami.
That's not a bad thing necessarily.
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