How we become human has a lot to do with the evolution undergone by our hands. Now, a multidisciplinary team led by Spanish scientists has discovered fossil remains of the oldest modern hand in Africa on record. The finding has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
The discovered fossil belongs to a hominid phalanx which, according to both morphological and functional analyzes, represents the oldest bone belonging to a modern hand. The fossil in question has been found in the Olduvai Gorge ( Tanzania) and would be 1.9 million years old, thus dating to the early Pleistocene.
“This phalanx has a very current appearance and from a statistical point of view, it cannot be differentiated from a homologous element of any person alive today, Because the primate hand reflects adaptations for both manipulation and locomotion , a bone from this period is very relevant for understanding the transition to the human way of life ”, Sergio Almécija, paleontologist at George Washington University (USA), explains to Sinc.
Examination of the fossil reveals that it was part of the little finger of the left hand of a hominid still unidentified but similar to Homo erectus , which is contemporary with other species such as Homo habilis.
“ The degree of curvature of the phalanx found is much lower (that of gorillas and chimpanzees) so the species to which it belonged had made the transition from the arboreal environment to a purely terrestrial way of life. Taking into account that the phalanges were more than 50% of the hand (14 bones out of 27), more than half of the hand was completely modern, almost 2 million years ago ”, Almécija concludes.
