![]() ![]() Each gorilla foot has five toes, but their big toe is opposable and can move much more flexibly than ours can.Īlmécija and his colleagues suspect that all living primates survived a late Miocene (12 to 5 million years ago) extinction event by specializing to exist in certain habitats. Like human hands, gorilla hands have five fingers, including an opposable thumb. Gorillas also appear to have inherited our more primitive hand structure. Like Humans, Chimps Tend to Be Right-handed As a result, chimps and orangutans do not have opposable thumbs as we do. ![]() Since the thumb is not as long, it just meets up with the palm, while the chimp's other four fingers extend upward. "Human hands are marked by a relatively long thumb when compared to the length of their four other fingers - a trait that is often cited as one of the reasons for the success of our species because it facilitates a 'pad-to-pad precision grip,'" Hiatt said.Ĭonversely, chimp hands are much longer and narrower. The researchers came to their conclusions after analyzing the hands of humans, chimps and orangutans, as well as the remains of hands for early apes like Proconsul heseloni and the hands of human ancestors, such as Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus sediba.Īlmécija and his team discovered that human hands today are not that different from those of the early human ancestors. Smaers and Jungers are researchers at Stony Brook University, where the research was conducted. Sergio Almécija, a scientist in the university's Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, led the study, which was co-authored by Jeroen Smaers and William Jungers. "The findings suggest that the structure of the modern human hand is largely primitive in nature, rather than, as some believe, the result of more recent changes necessary for stone tool-making," Kurtis Hiatt, a spokesperson for The George Washington University, told Discovery News. Prehistoric Moms Had Their Hands Full: Photos The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications, determined that while human hand proportions have changed little from those of the last common ancestor of chimps and humans, the hands of chimps and orangutans have evolved quite a bit. We might not be able to fight off a chimp, but we can make some pretty amazing needlepoints.Given our inherent human-centric viewpoint, we tend to think that our species is more advanced in all respects than other animals, but new research finds that human hands are more primitive than those of our closest primate ancestors: chimpanzees. Humans have a lot more fine motor control than chimps: we can do things like play a guitar, paint teeny tiny lines or thread a needle.Ĭhimps can’t, because of the way their neurons activate their muscles-they can’t pick and choose just a few muscle fibers at a time. They say that a big reason chimps can lift heavier things than we can, is that they have less control over how much muscle they use each time they lift. They say chimps are three to five times stronger than humans-something Hawkes would argue isn’t proven-but their explanation for why might still pass muster. But why? Scientific American tries to explain: So apes are definitely stronger than humans, probably around twice as strong. Once he’d corrected the measurement for their smaller body sizes, chimpanzees did turn out to be stronger than humans-but not by a factor of five or anything close to it. An adult male chimp, he found, pulled about the same weight as an adult man. In 1943, Glen Finch of the Yale primate laboratory rigged an apparatus to test the arm strength of eight captive chimpanzees. … But the “five times” figure was refuted 20 years after Bauman’s experiments. The suspicious claim seems to have originated in a flapper-era study conducted by a biologist named John Bauman. Some say that chimps are five to eight times stronger than humans, but those figures come from an old, poorly designed study, says John Hawkes, an evolutionary biologist: Other, more impressive figures often pop up when chimp attacks happen. A 2006 study found that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes, and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times heavier. The apes beat us in leg strength, too, despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion. Slate writes:Ī chimpanzee had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it came to pulling weights. In fact, the unfortunate student probably would have been better off had he been attacked by two humans. This summer, two chimpanzees attacked a graduate student at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden. ![]()
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