Hand Evolution Tied to Throwing Punches

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   Peter Kinnon

   October 26, 2015 at 6:27 pm

   This adaptation is, perhaps surprisingly, a correlate of the adaptation crucial to the evolution of the behaviours exhibited by humankind. Behaviours that include deep imagination (often referred to by the woolly term “intelligence”), advanced cognition and that reflexive form of consciousness that is enabled by complex language.
   Rather strangely, we can trace the evolutionary roots of the human aspect of these phenomena right back to the divergence of the pre-human ape which involved the trading of the snout for the hands to serve the primary food-processing function.
   The near-obligate use of tools which arose thereby having triggered the co-evolution of language and its correlate, an enormously enhanced level of consciousness.　
   The powerful jaw muscles of the snouts of our pre-anthropoid ancestors are also a primary mode of aggression. Here again, this function has been taken over by the hand and related anatomy of arm and shoulder. Our use of the jaws in fights having now been relegated to the odd bit of relatively harmless ear-biting.

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