If gesturing was strongly selected for in human evolution, then the fact that most people are right-handed is a consequence of that. The idea that language emerged from an ancestral gestural system located in the left brain hemisphere could explain why the vast majority of people are right-handed, Hopkins says. “Chimps that gesture with their right hand typically have a larger left Broca’s area, and those that don’t show a bias typically don’t show any asymmetry in the brain,” he notes. That notion is supported by previous studies that have shown anatomical asymmetries in chimpanzees’ brains in areas that are considered to be homologues of human language centers, such as Broca’s area, Hopkins says. The same cerebral hemisphere is host to most language functions in humans, which hints that an ancestral gestural system could have been the precursor for language, he says. Such lateralized hand use suggests that chimpanzees have a system in their left brain hemisphere that is coupled to the production of communicative gestures, says study author William Hopkins. The animals did not show this hand preference for noncommunicative actions, such as wiping their noses. Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center recently examined captive chimpanzees and found that most of them predominantly used their right hand when communicating with one another-for example, when greeting another chimp by extending an arm. Such gesturing may also explain why most people are right-handed. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to origins of language have long been a mystery, but mounting evidence hints that our unique linguistic abilities could have evolved from gestural communication in our ancestors. If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15.

We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest.

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. They share hand structure with orangutans, who probably evolved them independently.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: By contrast, chimpanzee hands have changed significantly 'since their last common ancestor, around 6 million years ago,' Almécija says. Most strikingly, their fingers have become much longer. 'Instead, we tested that assumption by incorporating actual morphological and phylogenetic information in a large sample of primate species.'Īlmécija and his colleagues found that the hands of our distant ancestors were actually very similar to our own. 'Contrarily to most studies in the field of human evolution, we did not assume that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was like a chimpanzee,' Dr. But in some ways, that may not be entirely true. Paleoanthropological studies tend to lean on the notion that human ancestors were originally monkey-like, slowly losing those traits through evolutionary time. The study was led by Sergio Almécija, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University, and published Tuesday in Nature Communications.

New research suggests that human hands may actually be more primitive than the hands of other dexterous primates, like chimpanzees. When humans think about primate evolution, we tend to picture ourselves at the pinnacle.

Monkey chimpanzee hand