Just a short video to show you the evolution

This following video created by dutch graphic designer Jurian Möller, illustrates 550 million years of evolution, completed with dates and species. Transitioning from modern man to amphibian to the earliest of the Animalia and back again in seconds, this is a charming depiction of human evolution:

To know more about his work and his book: http://evoboek.nl/en/

Cadaver study suggests fist fighting could have played a role in hand evolution

A newly published research suggests that our hands didn’t evolve only to improve our hand´s technical abillity, but also to figth between males that wanted to mate with females. That suggests that the human fist is not just an added evolutionary change due to natural selection, it also  gives advantge to figth between hominids.

The research was done by David Carrier and his researcher group from the university if Utah, and prove that the evolutional changes given in the hand made possible (by the anatomy of the hand and specially of the thumb) the clousure of the fist.

Along history, the male-male competition has been very important in great ape mating systems, A closed fist protects the hand bones from injury by reducing the tension in bones when strinking. The special anatomy and proportions of the thumb redirects the energy in a punch through the hand and the damage caused in the bones is lower. To prove that hypothesis, they used cadavers and to measure the bone deformation during striking by attaching tension indicators in the hand bones. 

As they reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, they found that tension and pressure were much higher in strikes where the hand was in a  relaxed position where it was in a closed position, with the fist closed.

Those findings demonstrate that our hand proportions evolve apart from improving technical ability also to allow the use of hands as a weapon during fighting.

SOURCE:  http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/uou-dmp101615.php

HAND BONE MORPHOLOGY IN HUMAN´S EVOLUTION

Humans are not the only animals that are able to use tools, but it is the one who use them more efficiently than any other species in the world. This ability is not only due to the highly developed brains, it is also because of the special morphology of our hands. 

One discovery of a hand bone of 1,42 million years old proves it. These results came from the autor Carol Ward from the University of Missouri and were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This discovery was carried up in Kenia where a 1.42 million year old metacarpal bone was discovered. By making different probes, researchers determined that it was of a Homo Erectus hominids, and presented a very important feature; a styloid process.

 This process is a small bony bump at the proximal end of the bone, which can be found in different bones of the body. In the hand, it connects the hand to the wrist and allows much more pressure force when hand is gripping an object. This feature, allows making and using objects more efficiently.

This discovery is very important because there was no evidence of this process in a more ancient hominid. Concretely, it was seen in Neanderthals, but it was not clear when was it formed.  In the place where metacarpal bone was discovered, there were many stone tools that reach as far back as 1.6 million years ago.

ARTICLE: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/1/121.abstract

Physical anthropology is a scientific discipline that focuses on the humans, their relation with non-human primates and their extincthominin ancestors. It is part of anthropology that studies the human beings.

This discipline is subdivided in different branches depending on the the type of studies. Although there are different branches, all of them are related with the evolutionary theory and with the human beings and are to understant human morphology and behavior among evolution. The most notable subunit is paleoanthropology that is the study of fossils to understand human evolution. It studies the extinct hominid and other primate species to determine the environment in which humans evolved and how they dispersed among earth.