It ranks among the great medical mysteries of our time, baffling the brightest brains and confounding the curious.
But a concerted effort from an international consortium involving researchers from Canada, France and Japan, believes it may have finally unravelled the riddle of the human hiccup.
In a report published this month in the journal BioEssays, the researchers propose that the hiccup is an evolutionary leftover -- a mechanism that allowed our ancient ancestors to breathe both water and air.
They have found striking similarities between hiccupping and the gill movements of tadpoles, and suggest there's a good reason why this physiological souvenir has survived to irritate modern-day humans 370 million years after our predecessors slithered out of the primordial soup.
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Dr. Jason Lisle | 6/1/2005
