Posted on 12/21/2012 3:34:08 AM PST by Makana
— The human hand is a finely tuned piece of equipment that is capable of remarkable dexterity: creating art, performing music and manipulating tools. Yet David Carrier from the University of Utah suggests that the human hand may have also evolved its distinctive proportions for a less enlightened reason: for use as a weapon.
In a new study, Carrier and colleague Michael Morgan publish their theory that human hands evolved their square palms and long thumb to stabilise the fist and produce a compact club for use in combat.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
And remember kids, this marvelous piece of adaptable engineering crawled up from the mud, climbed down from the tree and just ... you know ... happened.
...and a forefinger for the nose. How convenient was that?
Oh crap. Now SanFranNan will be calling for a ban on hands...
God Shaped Human Hands
adaptability is the key.
Chuck Norris’s hands didn’t evolve; they punched their way into existence. Primordial soup was actually primordial rock until it met Chuck Norris.
Let me guess, there is a government grant involved.
One thing I’ve noticed is how differently a strange menacing dog treats you when you have a stick in your hand. Wielding sticks is an overlooked human talent. Take some kids to the woods, and the first thing they do is find a really good stick. Look at photos of primitive people; they almost always have sticks in their hands. It’s what hands are for.
If hands were made for fighting then why do they break so easy? Anyone who’s spent any time in the ring will know what I’m talking about. Boxing gloves are there to protect YOUR hands, not the other guy’s face.
C'mon......don't you know that the forefinger is for pulling the trigger ???
I'm surprised the study didn't come to that conclusion...
no doubt the same god invented the boot ~ get real, all living things are designed however they are designed to fight and survive!
Which is why the notion doesn’t work. Just about any old stick or rock is a much better weapon than the hand, however it is shaped.
It is ridiculous to think the shape of the hand as weapon could have conferred any evolutionary advantage when much more efficient weapons are lying around all over the place.
Several years ago, I was friends with a young mother. My own kids were about 8 and 10 and her son was about one.
She was a neighbor who’d come visit with me for parenting advice and one thing that I stressed was that boys and girls were different.
I told her to watch her son on walks. Before he turned two, he’d be finding sticks to carry and swing about. Girls rarely did this.
I remember when he was about a year and a half old she called me excitedly yelling, “He found a stick! He found his first stick!! I mean he made a bee-line for it! That was amazing!”
I assured her that her son was very advanced for his age. ;-)
It’s pure instinct and I’ve never known a boy who didn’t do this. Sometimes girls will, but boys are positively driven.
Sadly, I’ve known plenty of mothers who shout, “Put that down!” They don’t understand that this is a natural thing for little boys to do.
Actually, gloves are there to protect the other guy's face, primarily. They make boxing look less violent, the reason they were invented. While at the same time making it much more dangerous for the boxers, which was purely an unintended consequence.
In the old days men boxed bare-handed. Bare hands cut up the faces, and blood went everywhere, upsetting women, wimps and liberals. (But I repeat myself.) Since the hand makes a lousy club, despite this article, a boxer just couldn't hit hard enough to actually do damage to the other guy's brain without breaking his finger bones.
So he didn't hit that hard. Not more than once per hand, anyway.
Bring in padded gloves. They spread the impact across both the hands and the face. A boxer can punch as hard as he wants without breaking his hands. Facial skin damage is minimized, so women and wussies don't get offended by flying blood.
But the recipient of the punches has his brain bouncing off the sides of his skull, resulting in multiple mini-strokes, which eventually produces the condition known as being "punchy." Look at Muhammad Ali.
Punchiness was more or less unknown before the invention of the boxing glove. The faces of veteran boxers were scarred to the max, but their minds were still functional.
This is one of the great classic examples of how liberal policies to address surface unpleasantness often make the situation a great deal worse, but in ways that are less obvious and thus acceptable.
To them. Nobody bothered to ask the boxers if they'd rather bleed a little and be scarred or suffer permanent serious brain damage.
This is actually similar to the difference in injury rate between (American) football and rugby. With all its "protective" equipment football allows the players to hit each other with full power, while rugby, with no pads, enforces lower impact speeds. Football has a much higher incidence and greater severity of injuries.
Yes, our hands evolved to fit the grips of handguns.
:^)
Tell me, again, why we're supposed to consider "scientists" more reliable than my 8-year-old. James is full of theories about dinosaurs that are just as provable as this man's "suggestion" that the hand "may have."
Uh huh. Because an opposable thumb wasn't useful for other things, like, say, gripping tools and manipulating items found in nature ... Characteristics that would give their owners a huge step up on the evolutionary ladder.
The fact is, the human fist, unless it's in the "hands" of someone like Mike Tyson, isn't a particularly formidable weapon. Just about any animal can do major damage to a man. The only thing that saves us is our brains, and in the case of a lot of Democrats, that would have consigned them to the category of "snack."
This strikes me as a couple of irrelevant revisionists looking for a vehicle to justify their salaries ...
In addition, when primates strike with their "hands", it's also with the palm heel as the point of blunt contact, then once contact is made, the fingers to seize and tear. I refer to the unfortunate incidents where chimps seem to go for tearing people's faces off.
Psalm 144: "Blessed be the LORD my Strength; Who teaches my hands to war, and my fingers to fight."
I am still waiting for pinkies to disappear : )
I studied Yi Li Chuan kung fu for a number of years and we learned what they called a “dragon” or “two-point” fist. The strike was with the first knuckles of the index and middle fingers with the fist loosely held and the knuckles in line with the forearm. But this was an internal style and we were told that it was not the force of the blow that mattered but the concentration of “chi” at the instant of contact. The palm was considered more effective as a striking instrument, for the reasons you describe. Although Yi Li was not about grabbing and holding.
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