LUCY’S HANDS

It was 8 million years ago and the Earth began to cool. Rainfall decreased and forests dwindled as the grasslands expanded. The grass was more resistant to fires and to changes in rainfall and it spread across a large part of the Earth. Today we call it the savannah, and it was a major factor in the evolution of early hominins.

Back in November 1974 palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson and one of his students discovered a skeleton in Ethiopia. It was a 40% complete fossil of an Australopithecus Afarencis individual and the skeleton showed that it walked upright. When the exploration party were celebrating the discovery that night they played the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” so the skeleton was called Lucy.

The Lucy skeleton was 3.2 million years old but the most important thing about Lucy was her upright posture, which gave her the advantage of being able to see across the top of the savannah grasses, and it also freed up her hands to do more than just help her walk along. This was one of the most significant advantages in the long line of evolution.

With hands, humans could now develop weapons like stone knives and spearheads to help them kill the larger and more ferocious carnivores that also inhabited the savannah, and by doing this they could supply themselves with meat, a much more efficient food for feeding the expanding brains of these evolving creatures.

This evolutionary spiral continued, then the first members of the homo genus appeared around 2.8 million years ago in the form of Homo habilis, followed about 2 million years ago by homo erectus whose name exemplifies the importance of the upright stance, and of course while this was happening the human hand was developing as well as the parts of the human brain that would be needed to control what the hand could do.

After this there was homo heidelbergensis, then the neanderthals and finally Homo Sapiens. At every stage the evolution of the brain and the ability of the human hand progressed.

With their remarkable ability to make tools like spears and arrows with which they could keep themselves protected and well fed they migrated out of Africa and into other continents over a long period between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago spreading across Asia, Europe and eventually reaching Australia and the Americas, all the time walking on their two feet and using their two remarkable hands.

It is thought that the development of human intelligence was accelerated by the need for the mind to control and take maximum advantage of the abilities of these hands. It’s also thought that language developed when human’s hands enabled them to form communities and begin farming rather than always pursuing a hunter gatherer lifestyle, because at this time, living among each other in villages and small towns required more communication between people, so the human brain needed to develop better linguistic abilities and more languages in order to transmit information about how to farm and how to treat animals and crops and how to treat each other in a village or a town.

People needed an agreed way of greeting each other. As far back as the ninth century BC people shook hands as a sign of allegiance, and this tradition continued, another dimension to what the hand could do.

It was now impossible to stop the expansion of Homo sapiens, and the villages turned into small towns and the towns turned into cities and then they began to explore the rest of the world.

The Portuguese ventured out on their boats and discovered the West Coast of Africa back in the 15th century. At that time Christopher Columbus also discovered the Americas and around this time people shook hands when they greeted each other and this gesture was supposed to make it obvious that neither person was holding any weapon.

In the next century, Spain, Portugal, England and others explored and colonised North and South America as well as Asia and Africa. In the 17th century the Dutch discovered the West Coast of Australia and Russian explorers ventured into the tundras of Siberia. In the 18th century the South Pacific and Oceania were explored by British and Spanish and Portuguese fleets. In the early 20th century the north and south poles were discovered and all of this was done by human beings using their minds and their hands

Now, when I meet my sister and her husband Paul, we always shake hands.

Hands that Lucy gave us.