The Sunghir Human Hands

Abstract

As the interface between the body and technology, in all of its myriad forms, the skeletal hand morphology of Late Pleistocene humans has received increasing attention since the work of Sarasin (1932) and especially Musgrave (1970, 1971, 1973), as paleoanthropologists have documented a series of contrasts between archaic Homo and recent human hand bones (e.g., Vlček 1975; Trinkaus 1983b; Vandermeersch 1991; Niewoehner et al. 1997; Niewoehner 2001, 2008; Crevecoeur 2008; Lorenzo 2007; Trinkaus in press). However, since there were major changes in human technology between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, and especially with the Mid Upper Paleolithic (MUP), the comparisons of concern should be between late archaic humans and early modern humans. For the Early Upper Paleolithic, the latter include relatively complete hand remains from Nazlet Khater 2 and scattered hand bones from Tianyuan 1 and Brassempouy (Henry-Gambier et al. 2004; Crevecoeur 2008; Shang and Trinkaus 2010). There are then relatively abundant hand remains from the MUP (Verneau 1906; Matiegka 1938; Mallegni et al. 1999; Sládek et al. 2000; Trinkaus 2006c; Trinkaus et al. 2010, 2014), including some immature ones (Mallegni and Parenti 1973; Sergi et al. 1974; Trinkaus et al. 2002b). Yet few of them have been described in detail. In this context, the Sunghir manual remains are described and select aspects are compared across Late Pleistocene samples (principally features that appear to change with the emergence of modern humans). For these descriptions and comparisons, the Sunghir 1 hand bones are paleontologically well preserved. Of the 54 bones potentially present for Sunghir 1 (not counting pollical sesamoid bones), 49 are known, and none sustained more than minor marginal erosion. The originally missing bones include one pisiform bone and four distal phalanges from the ulnar digits. During and after excavation, the right and left hands were mixed, so that the bones have been sorted based on morphology and (for the ulnar middle and distal phalanges) size.