Humans may have evolved dexterous hands around half a million years earlier than previously thought, discovery of a 1.42-million-year-old bone fossil in Kenya suggests.
Humans have a distinctive hand anatomy that allows them to make and use tools. Apes and other non-human primates do not have these distinctive anatomical features in their hands, and the point in time at which these features first appeared in human evolution is unknown.
Now, a University of Missouri researcher and colleagues have found a new hand bone from a human ancestor who roamed the Earth in East
Africa approximately 1.42 million years ago. They suspect the bone belonged to the early human species, Homo erectus.
The discovery of this bone is the earliest evidence of a modern human-like hand, indicating that this anatomical feature existed more than half a million years earlier than previously known.
“This bone is the third metacarpal in the hand, which connects to the middle finger. It was discovered at the ‘Kaitio’ site in West Turkana, Kenya,” said Carol Ward, professor of pathology and anatomical sciences at MU.
“What makes this bone so distinct is that the presence of a styloid process, or projection of bone, at the end that connects to the wrist. Until now, this styloid process has been found only in us, Neanderthals and other archaic humans,” Ward said.
The styloid process helps the hand bone lock into the wrist bones, allowing for greater amounts of pressure to be applied to the wrist and hand from a grasping thumb and fingers.
Ward and her colleagues note that a lack of the styloid process created challenges for apes and earlier humans when they attempted to make and use tools. This lack of a styloid process may have increased the chances of having arthritis earlier, Ward said.
The bone was found near the sites where the earliest Acheulian tools have reportedly appeared. Acheulian tools, however, are ancient, shaped stone tools that include stone hand axes more than 1.6 million years old.