![]() But now with a growing body of evidence, human hands have in fact stayed close to being the same for millions of year. This makes it ideal for them to swing in trees but aren’t as handy with grasping objects.įor many years the prevailing view among researchers was that humans had chimplike hands and that our hands changed in response to the pressures of natural selection to make us better toolmakers. With chimpanzees it’s the opposite-they have much longer fingers and shorter thumbs. Humans have a fairly long thumb and shorter fingers allowing us to touch our thumbs to any point along our fingers to therefore easily grasp objects. In a study done by the journal of Nature Communications, they found that although the human hand proportions have changed some from the last common ancestor of chimps and humans, the hands of chimpanzees and orangutans have evolved substantially. Here are 18 fascinating facts about one super impressive body part: the human hands. A new study suggests that there are some aspects of the human hand that are anatomically primitive-even more so than our closest ancestors: the chimpanzee. Scientists have assumed that our hands evolved their uniqueness over millions of years. Human hands can build amazing structures, play the keys of a piano, and paint works of art that stand the test of time. There might be a lot of hand clasping going on that I will never know.Human hands are a marvel of dexterity. “I only see what the chimpanzees show me. The difficulty, as in this study, lies in the limitations of observational data, van Leeuwen notes. The team is also looking for signs of dominance in hand clasps and other potential functions of this behavior. Van Leeuwen and his colleagues are currently researching potential differences in how chimps learn handclasp behaviors-for example, from peers, a parent, or other adults-and whether this acquisition is flexible. Perry is less convinced, suspecting that chimps and humans could have evolved independently to learn socially and build culture. “In the absence of broader comparative data it is hard to say whether this shared feature is more due to a shared phylogenetic history or to similar need for social conventions (convergent evolution).” “The motivation/drive to learn socially is most likely a widespread phenomenon that is both spurred by similar selection pressures and phylogenetically preserved,” he writes in an email to The Scientist. Given chimps’ close genetic relationship with humans, he suspects social learning was a quality found in the common ancestor of the two species. Van Leeuwen sees a potential link between this chimp cultural behavior-and specifically, their ability to learn and then maintain customs over long periods of time-and the evolution of human social behavior. While the function of handclasping is not known, University of Antwerp researcher Edwin van Leeuwen, the study’s author, says he’s not bothered by the ease of comparing these handclasps to human handshakes, themselves a cultural behavior. Andrews in Scotland, first reported observing handclasp grooming in wild chimps in 1978, and this behavior among chimp dyads has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. “The longevity of is new,” she adds, noting that the semi-wild setting of the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia where the research was conducted means that the study’s findings likely apply to wild chimps, too.Ĭhimp researcher William McGrew, then affiliated with the University of St. “The fact that different groups of chimps have different repertoires of gestures is something we’ve known for some time,” says Mary Lee Jensvold, the associate director of the chimp sanctuary Fauna Foundation, who was not involved in the research, but it was not clear how stable these behaviors were. The study findings represent a step forward in understanding chimp sociality and chimp culture-the behavioral patterns that are learned from others in a social group. Over a 12-year span, two groups of chimpanzees maintained distinct, consistent styles of clasping hands while grooming one another, according to a study published May 26 in Biology Letters. ![]()
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