Ancient Human Relative Had Amazingly Modern Hands

Evolution works the same for everything. We have a root of being which grows to adapt to the environment it chooses for life and then an infinite path to progress unravels until it reaches its dead end. When it comes to humans, we don’t exactly know where we are in this path, whether we will continue to progress some way or another, to either a physiological extent or a rational and spiritual one, or whether we have already reached our dead end.

From a physiological point of view, we surely did, as the life environment we have created for ourselves doesn’t call for biological adaptation but rather to another form of adaptation, which better relates to unseen processes, the ones that are ultimately thought and felt, not shown in our body parts.

A team of scientists has managed to discover the remains of a hand belonging to one of our ancestors. The fossil is a 3.6 centimeter two million old fragment which reveals a lot about behavior and body type.

The extremely interesting discovery reveals proofs related to the times when modern humanlike hands first began to appear in the fossil record, suggesting that ancient human relatives may have been larger and taller than previously thought. The fragment belongs to an ancient pinky bone and pushes back in time an essential step in the evolution of our forebear from tree climbing forages to tool wielding hunters, as the experts have highlighted.

“Our discovery not only shows that a creature” — dubbed OH 86 — “with a modern-looking hand existed 1.85 million years ago, it also shows that OH 86 was bigger sized than any other prior and contemporary hominin,” Domingues Rodrigo, one of the researchers declared.

The archeological evidence found in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania shows that size mattered, further shedding light on the way human ancestors dragged the carcasses of big animals, most of the times weighing more than one hundred kilos.

Scientists have believed that modern hands have evolved to use stone tools. While hands of our primate ancestors were perfectly designed to climb trees, as years have passed by, they have found evolutionary methods of survival and adaptation to the new environments they were discovering. This recent finding, a simple remain of a pinky bone suggests a much more complex story behind the evolution of the modern hand. The hand bones of ancient hominin lineages are sometimes more similar to modern hands compared to those of more recent lineages. The recently discovered ancient human relative had amazingly modern hands.

The tiny finger of the adult left hand belongs to an unidentified hominin lineage, similar to Homo erectus, the first hominin known to regularly keep tools it made. The bone is approximately 1.4 inches long, namely a similar size as the equivalent bone in our hand.

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