chimpanzee hand bones chimpanzee hand bones

At the time, news of a humanlike hand that was 1.8 million years old caused a firestorm of interest. “The hand bones resemble those of Homo sapiens sapiens ,” they wrote from the individual fragments, they had reconstructed a hand that had especially powerful joints at the base of the fingers and a prominent thumb. There was great excitement in May 1964 when primate researcher John Russell Napier, along with paleoanthropologists Phillip Tobias and Louis Leakey, reported that over the course of many years of working in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, they had found remains, including many hand bones, of the first humans to make tools. This notion can be traced back to a few spectacular fossil finds in Africa from the early 1960s. Those that could grasp small objects clearly had the advantage.įor a long time, scientists thought that the early members of the genus Homo started out equipped with a hand anatomically similar to the hand of a modern human. The development of the primate hand probably started with small ancestors that lived on the ground and gradually conquered the tree canopy as their new home. We can trace the evolution of our hands back to the very beginning of the primate ancestral chart over 70 million years ago. The result is a multi-faceted tool that has helped us build, hunt, eat and communicate. The balance between hand bones, tendons, muscles and nerves was constantly being refined, as were the hand’s increasingly sensitive sense of touch and the brain’s ever-more sophisticated oversight of motor coordination. The evolution of our brain and our anatomy advanced in lockstep. And so advantageous adaptations in hand structure prevailed as natural selection took its course. The more skilled our ancestors were with their hands, the more successful they were and, therefore, the higher the survival rate of their offspring. They could then be used for a wide range of tasks: transporting food or offspring, scooping up water, gathering material to build a shelter or holding objects in one hand and manipulating them with the other to carry out specific tasks. There is no doubt about it: Our hands are an exceptional development in the history of evolution.īut how did a precision tool like the human hand, a tool that seems to have been at least as important for the process of becoming human as our upright gait, develop? The evolutionary ball started rolling, of course, when walking on two feet meant the hands were no longer needed for locomotion. With his fingers, he “sees” details many sighted scientists miss. Out in the field, he feels the complex morphological structures of mussels and of the rocks in which they are found. A specialist famous for his work on marine mussels and their ecosystems, he has never seen a fossil. Our fingers can even replace our eyes as ways to perceive the world, as the Dutch paleontologist Geerat Vermeij, who has been blind since the age of 3, can attest. With a little bit of practice, we can use our fingers to tell real silk from synthetic silk or real leather from fake leather, even with our eyes closed. We can detect uneven surfaces with our fingers that we cannot see with our naked eye. With its help we are able to fit a key directly into a lock, even in the dark. We use it to feel the temperature of a breeze and of water. It operates almost like an independent sensory organ. It is not only the flexibility granted by the fully opposable thumb that makes the human hand so special, but also its extraordinary ability to feel and to touch. Ball your hand up into a fist until your thumb lies on top of and lends support to your index, middle and ring fingers. You should be able to turn it 180 degrees with ease. Touch the tips of your four fingers with your thumb. It will be time well spent, because they are evolutionary marvels.

Take a moment to pay attention to your hands. This story originally appeared in the December issue of Discover magazine as 'Talk to the Hand.' Support our science journalism by becoming a subscriber.

Chimpanzee hand bones chimpanzee hand bones