Hands-On—In Many Different Ways

Abstract

About a month ago, we had a major snowstorm (or at least major by New York standards), and we ended up with 15 inches of snow. Fortunately it was powdery and easy to shovel, because we don't own a snow blowerthough I did dream of such a device as we were working our way down the driveway. A couple of days later, my husband read in the paper that in the aftermath of the storm, a nearby hospital had reattached fingers to the hands of five individuals who had tried to unclog their snow blowers. All of a sudden those shovels looked great. They may be hard on our backs, but at least we came inside to warm our hands with the same number of fingers we went out with. That newspaper item made me appreciate my hands yet again, and it reminded me of a book I'd read years ago by the primate biologist, John Napier (1980). It's called simply Hands, and it covers everything from the evolution of the thumb to the classification of fingerprints. Napier was such an expert on the subject that he was asked to analyze the hand bones of Homo habilis when the Leakeys discovered these fossils in the 1950s. Napier also was a serious student of living primates, but perhaps more importantly for readers of his book, he truly loved hands. At the beginning of the book Napier notes that he didn't learn much about