Humans have more primitive hands than chimpanzees

[Judi Lynn]

Humans have more primitive hands than chimpanzees
By Michael Balter 14 July 2015 11:00 am 18 Comments



The human hand is a marvel of dexterity. It can thread a needle, coax intricate melodies from the keys of a piano, and create lasting works of art with a pen or a paintbrush. Many scientists have assumed that our hands evolved their distinctive proportions over millions of years of recent evolution. But a new study suggests a radically different conclusion: Some aspects of the human hand are actually anatomically primitive—more so even than that of many other apes, including our evolutionary cousin the chimpanzee. The findings have important implications for the origins of human toolmaking, as well as for what the ancestor of both humans and chimps might have looked like.

Humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor perhaps about 7 million years ago, and their hands now look very different. We have a relatively long thumb and shorter fingers, which allows us to touch our thumbs to any point along our fingers and thus easily grasp objects. Chimps, on the other hand, have much longer fingers and shorter thumbs, perfect for swinging in trees but much less handy for precision grasping. For decades the dominant view among researchers was that the common ancestor of chimps and humans had chimplike hands, and that the human hand changed in response to the pressures of natural selection to make us better toolmakers.

But recently some researchers have begun to challenge the idea that the human hand fundamentally changed its proportions after the evolutionary split with chimps. The earliest humanmade stone tools are thought to date back 3.3 million years, but new evidence has emerged that some of the earliest members of the human line—such as the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”)—had hands that resembled those of modern humans rather than chimps, even though it did not make tools. And back in 2010, a team led by paleoanthropologist Sergio Almécija, now at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., began arguing that even earlier human relatives, dating to 6 million years ago—very soon after the human-chimp evolutionary split—already had humanlike hands as well. This even included the ability to press the thumb against the fingers with considerable force, a key aspect of precision gripping.

To get a grasp on what early hands really looked like, Almécija and his colleagues analyzed the thumb and finger proportions of a large number of living apes and monkeys, including modern humans. They then compared these to the hands of several extinct species of apes and early humans, including Ardi, the Neandertals, and the 2-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba from South Africa, which its discoverers controversially think might be a direct ancestor of humans. The sample also included the 25-million-year-old fossil ape known as Proconsul.

More:
http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2015/07/humans-have-more-primitive-hands-chimpanzees

[GeoWilliam750]

1. Our brains are also shrinking

Interestingly, our cranial capacity has shrunk by about 20% over the last 35,000 years or so, from the Cro-Magnon era.