Altogether, fifty muscles can be called into play just to get a piece of food from your lips to your stomach, and they must snap to attention in exactly the right order to ensure that whatever you dispatch into the alimentary system doesn’t go down the wrong way and end up lodged in an airway, like Brunel’s coin. The complexity of human swallowing is largely because our larynx is low in the throat compared with other primates. To accommodate our upright posture when we became bipedal, our necks became longer and straighter and moved to a more central position beneath the skull rather than
