The Heimlich maneuver was not discovered by Henry Heimlich in 1974 as we are told, it was discovered by a man in a cave 150,000 years ago. There were three of them sitting by a fire in a cave. There was a woman sitting next to her mate (to her right), and to his right was another man, his best friend. They were eating some meat they had just cooked and the woman had just hungrily torn off a large chunk from the bone they were sharing, with her teeth, when she started to choke. The two men were greatly alarmed but helpless as her eyes darted wildly in the orange light of the fire as she struggled to breathe. Suddenly the friend had a revelation! He realized that the meat was stuck deep in her throat and that if he could force the air from her lungs upward it might dislodge the plug. He immediately jumped up, kneeled behind her, wrapped his arms around her middle under her breasts and was about to perform the first Heimlich when the husband, seeing his friend inexplicably molesting his wife in her distress, picked up his club and brained him. So instead of the Heimlich maneuver being discovered in 150,000 BCE in a cave, and passed on from there, to save future centuries of countless victims of choking, the man who resorted to violence out of impulsive fear was our ancestral exemplar for how to respond in an emergency - i.e., with blind rage. And that is why human evolution has favored the most aggressive among us over those with vision.
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